Singer-songwriter Juanita Stein has just released her fourth solo album The Weightless Hour via Agricultural Audio. Along with the album’s release, she’s shared a new music for focus track “Motionless.”
Juanita explains the song “is about my inability to remain still, I have an inexplicable desire to keep moving no matter what, how or when. I’d rather have the car drive in reverse than have it sit still. I’d rather the train head in any direction, than stall on the tracks. I’m acknowledging that I hold my breath through the pain of things and rather than sit and deal with the discomfort, I’ll move in any other direction. I’m constantly learning, as I think a lot of us are, how to be motionless”.
The Weightless Hour sees Juanita Stein join forces once more with long-time collaborator, producer Ben Hillier. After originally teaming up for 2020’s Snapshot, Stein’s third record, which was built from collected fragments of grief following the loss of her father, it was Hillier’s penchant for minimalism – his instinct for risk-taking while stripping sounds back to their gleaming bones – that aligned with her vision for her fourth project.
In removing most instrumental additions beyond the guitar (and you will notice there are no drums on the LP), with The Weightless Hour, Stein made a subconscious choice to make the project entirely her own. In the space freed by the stripped-back instrumentation, her storytelling bleeds freely like watercolors across a blank page. The album is an intensely human document with a profound sense of dignity. A record on which Stein has found that exploring a more restrained side can yield work that is armed with experience and yet is all the lighter for it, where your attention isn’t demanded and yet is effortlessly claimed. Every sound, every choice, has earned its place.
“I think making records is a really powerful way of letting go of experiences,” Stein notes. “I’m allowing myself to kiss things goodbye.”
Are you going to give this one a spin?
