“There was a point between records where it actually pained me to work on music, which was an unfamiliar and unpleasant feeling,” says Brooke Annibale.
That had to be especially true for someone for whom music has always been more of refuge than a vocation. And when the creative process began to hurt, the Pittsburgh-raised, Rhode Island-based singer/songwriter found herself confronting the possible loss of something she’d long taken for granted.
“Music has been my safe place since I was a teenager, the one thing I’ve always turned to,” she says. “Losing that felt like losing a relationship.”
That monumental unease begot “Try Again,” the deeply personal new single from Annibale’s sixth LP, Bolder Font, out September 17 via Tone Tree. After more than 20 years of making music, she took it upon herself to write, produce, edit and mix the entire album. After a deal with Nettwerk Music Group ended roughly a year after 2022’s Better By Now, Annibale learned to operate the studio console, working that album’s producer, Christian “Leggy” Langdon (Meg Myers, Amos Lee). Taking greater control of the recording process was a therapeutic necessity at the time. And in that sense, “Try Again” is quiet mission statement.
“I wrote it like I was talking directly to music itself, the way you’d speak to someone you were afraid of losing,” says Annibale. “The conversation in the song toggles between talking to myself and talking to music like it was a person slipping away. Somewhere in the making of this record, I found my way back to that safe space again.”
We’re proud to premiere Brooke Annibale’s “Try Again.”
—Hobart Rowland
See Brooke Annibale live.
