Premiere: Lucy Isabel washes ashore with ‘Something New’

No matter how far we wander, our hometown and its many straggling, tattered ends are forever woven into our whole being. Who we are today is made possible by who we were then. Floating between her New Jersey roots and a transplant life now in Nashville, folk singer-songwriter Lucy Isabel tunes her emotions into the transitory nature of existence. Her “Something New” music video, premiering today, untangles feelings of uncertainty, weary angst for something more and pangs in her core of needing to recharge back home. “Faded photographs in a half-empty book / It’s the perfect scene, take a second look,” she waxes wistful, the shoreline thick with waves slapping against the sands of both her past and the present. The chill in the frosty January air stings even the camera. “And hang on for the ride / ‘Cause they got you: bait on the hook.”

The visual, directed by Andrea Morgan, opens up on Sandy Hook Gateway National Recreation Area with a World World II-era fort peeking through close-up shots and expansive, wintry sweeps. Grainy home footage mingles with Isabel’s current state, her look bittersweet for what could have been but fearlessly embracing what is and was. “In the summer of 2017, my now-husband took a job that required him to move up to the Northeast. I stayed behind in Nashville for about four months and then made a trip up to the Northeast to see if I could make a go of living there,” she writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “Pretty much every day, I would walk around his neighborhood and try to envision myself as a part of the community. But after about three weeks, I realized that I needed to be back in Nashville.”

Her awakening, one riddled with as much sorrow to leave everything behind, has given birth to her forthcoming debut full-length. Her tears plop upon fiddle and guitar in oceanic shapes, and without that vital realization, she, perhaps, could never have stumbled upon such gorgeous musical flight. “I grew up in the Northeast, and it’s a real, undeniable part of me. But Nashville has become just as genuine a home for me,” says Isabel, whose voice is a splendid, sky-tearing routine that strikes at the heart of life and our own many travels. Despite the winds constantly blowing us here and there, may we never completely forget how it all started to begin with.

“Something New” floats off Isabel’s new album, Rambling Stranger, out everywhere June 14.

Watch below:

Photo Credit: Andrea Morgan

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