Premiere: Luca Chesney may risk everything with a smokey ‘Revolver’

The chains gripped their wrists and cut into flesh. The bondage not only tore at their bodies but their minds began to slip. The cave moaned around them, and the darkness closed in, a lingering presence with a heaving, moody spirit all its own. The bodies were those of young adults, who had been incarcerated in the underground natural dungeon since they were little, and all they’ve ever known is a makeshift puppet show projected onto the back wall of the cave. That is their reality. Tangible but fleeting, ever shifting, ever translucent.

“Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain wall has been built, like a screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets,” Socrates orates in the seventh book of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a collection of wisdom highlighting the impression of education on the body. When one of the prisoners escapes, he is forced to look into the fire. He is enlightened and forever changed, never able to retreat to his naivety, no matter how badly he wants it. Plato utilizes these objects to illustrate humanity’s progress ⎯⎯ the chains represent ignorance; the light is our understanding; the cave is the world. Growth can be duly painful and imperative if we are ever going to muddle through this existence.

Newcomer Luca Chesney, out of New York, alludes to this work with her new song “Revolver,” a ghostly veil of self-reflection and ambition. “I ask myself why I’m still wanting more / It spins like a loaded gun on the floor / There is no way I can ignore,” she examines, the production billowing in puff clouds of percussion. In many ways, she is the kid once detained to the cold stone wall, left to the trickery of projections, and through the song’s lethargic trickle, she comes to greater understanding of herself and the world which is on fire around her. “There is no time to waste / So, I’m here with you today,” she later murmurs, the shadowy figures morphing inside and outside her head.

On the song, she tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the song today, “‘Revolver’ is a playful love song to the kind of truth that can unravel your life if you let it. ‘Revolver’ is what drives us to annihilate our comfortable ideas, our familiar place in society, and the stories we tell ourselves just to see if there is something underneath. It’s the un-ignorable need to see what is real no matter how much it costs.”

“Revolver” samples her forthcoming new record, Mother Electric, out later this year. Chesney’s musical pursuits were ignited when hearing Joan Osborne’s “What If God was One of Us” at the impressionable age of 11. Her music is often indebted to that same willingness to question everything, to nurture curiosity, to want to change the world through challenging the status quo. This is just her beginning.

Listen below:

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