Premiere: Surrender Hill long for ‘Winter’s End’ with a new song

Life’s innate duality drives us forward. Where there is sadness, there’s always joy. Anger, jubilation. Winter, spring. Dark, then light. We weather many storms so we may understand and better appreciate the break, the clouds parting to reveal a stunning orb of light, warmth, and solace. “When it’s all said and done / The journey kept me holding on,” observes singer-songwriter Afton Seekins ⏤ one-half of Americana duo Surrender Hill, alongside Robin Dean Salmon. With a new song called “Winter’s End,” premiering today on B-Sides & Badlands, the rootsy players bask in the nature and the world pulsating around their feet.

Seekins’ voice flicks through the images, as a way to let the sorrow pour out of her heart onto cold, snow-capped earth. “Hope is where I stand when drowning by another’s hand / I still see good in a bitter man / Who can’t fight the fear within,” she cracks it open from the start. Current circumstances might be completely unconquerable, but it is par for the course ⏤ light and hope are inevitabilities as anything else.

“Winter’s End” stemmed from a late 2017 move to a horse property hunched inside the North Georgia Mountains. A crisp, fluffy early mid-November snow wrought plenty of darkness but just as much rumination on life and happiness. “Robin was outside ‘mowing the snow,’ as he likes to say,” writes Seekins over email, “and I started thinking about our life and where we ended up. Both of us have had our rough patches, and I felt reminded that as long as I stayed grounded through the rough times, light would appear. I started working on a lyric and melody around the idea of this little piece of land carrying us through the rough times.”

Both fragility and beauty operate in the melody, instruments shaping beneath their tightly-strung harmony work, and a soothing agent seeps from their cores. “This lonely road of circumstance gets caught up in the wilderness / All I know is this little piece of land will carry me through winter’s end,” Seekins resigns to her life at present, knowingly inviting whatever shall be to come forth from the shadows. “Sometimes I cry but tears of joy for setting free the hateful noise / And even when they sell me short / I still get what I came here for.”

Already a fixture in their live shows, “Winter’s End” has proven to be quite a special moment. “I am blown away by the movement and melody of the tune. I’m kind of jealous I didn’t come up with the melody,” says Salmon. “The audience response is always good, and it draws people in. It is always a wonderful moment in our set.”

“Winter’s End” comes from the duo’s forthcoming fourth album, A Whole Lot of Freedom, out everywhere April 3. Their backgrounds, both together and apart, inform much of their work. They weave in great understanding of the human condition, torn and battered, yet resilient and commanding, and across the new record, they center on stories ⏤ in whatever form that takes, from personal anecdotes to second-hand accounts.

“We both have very colorful backgrounds and are big dreamers. Those dreams have led us to some incredible places in our lives, and, ultimately, to each other. We are 17 years apart in age, and yet we have lived, at moments, very parallel lives,” muses Salmon. “We both love the West and the frontier, and yet we both lived in NYC for 10 years but 15 years apart. We have a lot to talk about, and we experience a lot together. We are both observers so we draw from what we see around us.”

Listen below:

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