Tuesday

Streetlights time the black night, a metronome of blurred stars through the downpour, the only guide, the only glow aside from the faint, wonky ray of the only working headlight. Sunken eyes flick back and forth at him in the rear-view mirror, devil-red gazing out his gaunt head, where the circus is always in town. His clothes hang off him loosely, his skin clings to his skeleton like a worn bedsheet. “Gotta keep going,” he mutters to himself. Can’t stay here. So he drives. It was a Tuesday, a rainy Tuesday. “Lover, leave me,” she said, and it was as final as choking on your sins in the mirror. The rear-view mirror. Looking back. Back. No going back. How many nights, how many months, decades has he been driving? Eyes on the road, looking back. Only back. To regret. Destination? Resignation.

Jeff Collier

“As individuals assigned female at birth, we were taught to be submissive and silent in the face of injustice, leading to the suppression of emotions like frustration, rage, and anger over centuries. The song encourages the expression of female rage through the voice, allowing the release of built-up tension and anger that is ready to be returned to its sender. May you reclaim your voices, express your emotions, break free from these harmful patterns, and dare to release using the full spectrum of your sound.”

Laura Carbone, Composer

“Tuesday”, the third single from Laura Carbone’s upcoming album “The Cycle”, is creepy as fuck. It sounds like skin crawling, it feels like slow cancer in a circus tent. Laura has always explored the depths in her music, and in her own psyche. Songs like “Silky Road” or “Heavy, Heavy” from her 2015 debut album “Sirens”, the explosive dirge “Nightride” and the title track from the 2018 album “Empty Sea”, or the searing live version of Empty Sea’s “Cellophane Skin” from 2020’s “Laura Carbone – Live at Rockpalast” are all testament to a certain fearlessness toward confronting the dark, to facing it, to facing it down. This and Laura’s vocal command of the whole spectrum of emotions, from the most delicate loving whisper to the fiercest feminine rage are perhaps what inspired Swans’ Michael Gira and Kristof Hahn to invite her to sing backing vocals on their latest album, The Beggar.

Laura’s vocal on “Tuesday” is possessed by a rarified paradox of intimacy and icy detachment. She’s above it, observing it, thinking out loud, screaming out loud in an exorcism of release. Her cough in the middle of the song is real, so real it made her vomit during recording. Her band sounds like a troupe of traveling minstrels stuck in a swamp. Yeah, in a good way. And the demon the song is about, the toxic self-inflicting patriarch behind the wheel, will likely be nursing those salty wounds for all eternity.

Laura Carbone has moved on from hers. She’s finding healing from those and other old wounds in her music, in sounds and frequencies, in her voice and in herself, and she has channelled her unique emotional and spiritual journey into her next album, the 13-track opus “The Cycle”, set for release in April 2024.

Jeff Collier