Photo by Taylor McCutchan
Premiere: Megan Brickwood yearns for change with ‘Nothing New’
Brickwood asks for a cleansing.
Many things in life are cyclical. Some things change; others do not. That’s just the way of it. With her new song “Nothing New,” Megan Brickwood observes the sociopolitical turmoil of 2020 and gazes “back through history and feeling like the same patterns, ideas, prejudices, etc., repeat without end or hope of real change,” she remarks.
“Nothing New” delicately unravels its string-bound arrangement. It’s appropriately moody, plaintive, and confrontational. “How I pray a good rain is gonna fall / Found my true gods crying in a bathroom stall,” she sings, finding herself and her beliefs mirrored back in the ruinous world around her feet. “I paid my pennies to ride on the wrecking ball…”
Brickwood agonizes over her words and what’s boiling over in society, yet she safeguards herself from being totally broken. She gathers up her lyrics and presents “a turnaround after the bridge, which asks the question, ‘Is there more?,'” she explains to B-Sides & Badlands, “which is answered with an anecdote of a simple conversation between two people at a farmer’s market, talking about the future. The suggestion is that change is always possible, and happens in humble moments and the simple exchanging of ideas between people in their everyday lives.”
Featuring dobro played by Jeff Fielder, “Nothing New” samples Brickwood’s debut album, All the Same, out everywhere on October 18. Her latest offering scorches the earth, pleading for a complete cleansing, and asks: if not now, when? Brickwood shifts through the rubble looking for that answer and seems to find it nestled within her own mind.
Listen to “Nothing New” below.
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