Premiere: Rod Picott wallows in heartache in new video, ‘Folds of Your Dress’

We are fools wandering aimlessly through this life. If we’re lucky, we may learn a thing or two and squander more others. Rending his heart right in two, halves that beat and drip in his hands, singer-songwriter Rod Picott turns to the music to cope and understand his sometimes savage tendencies. With “Folds of Your Dress,” paired with a barebones visual, premiering today, he navigates such uncertain waters of heartache and his often misguided notions that lead him to push people away. “Right now I’m a goddamn mess / Did I set you free just like I did the rest,” he grapples with his wrongdoing. Only acoustic guitar and harmonica come to his aid, and his voice is both weary and sharp.

“Careful what you wish for dear / Wishes come with souvenirs / You don’t get to throw one part away keep the other part for another day,” he sings. Regret and misery mingle as one, at times harmonious and other times grinding against one another, and you never know exactly which sample is which. You only know the pain that squeezes out of him as a rain cloud bursting in the height of summer. Picott longs for the intimacy he once felt, comforting and enveloping, and so, the cloak of loneliness is a warm, but totally dangerous, agent of the past. His demons slither out from the abyss and wrap their coils around him.

The earth, once vibrant and swelling at his feet, only seems to crumble further into dust. He mourns, “It’s my own doing that I’m here alone / Ain’t nobody blowing up the telephone / Just the fire in my head one side of an unmade bed.” His rasp is an apt vehicle for the kind of unimaginable loss that’s altogether crushing and pitiless. The video, too, filmed by Stacie Huckeba, layers on the emotion in bubbling slathers that hits you right squarely between the eyes.

On the song and video, Picott writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “‘Folds of Your Dress’ is a romantic question. I was confronting my own proclivity for rejecting love,” he says. “I’ve had wonderful, smart, beautiful women in my life, and I wanted to ask myself why I always push them away in the end. It’s self defeating, and I want to understand it. Asking the question is the beginning of getting to the answer.”

“Folds of Your Dress” is an essential cut from Picott’s latest album, Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil, out everywhere now.

Watch below:

Photo Credit: Stacie Huckeba

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