Current Joys, the songwriting moniker of Nick Rattigan, has released his new album East My Love, out now via Secretly Canadian. Rattigan wrote East My Love alone in the woods in Tennessee, with no cell reception and nobody in earshot for miles. Composed three years before Love + Pop, the experimental pop double record he released in 2023 and 2024 that featured Lil Yachty, Lala Lala, & Slow Hollows, the songs on East My Love felt too raw to confront until he felt well and truly out from underneath the cloud that had been cast over him. Rattigan describes the songs as “landmines” that, for years, threatened to upend his carefully balanced mental state. “They were just triggers that would put me back in this emotional space, and I think eventually I got to a place where they were more comforting,” he recalls. “That’s what I hope people find out of the record – a solace from any anxieties or depressions.”
Walking around in the woods, playing the songs on acoustic guitar, Rattigan felt himself sink deeply into the rich, vast natural environment, a space in which he could access the base, almost childlike anger and pain he was contending with. When it came time to record the songs two years later, he worked with Andrew Sarlo, who was able to pull him back to the light while working on songs he had previously found too triggering to touch.
“East My Love is an album I wrote at a low point, where I was struggling with a lot of mental health stuff,” shares Nick Rattigan. “Writing it was like my comfort blanket. In all of the madness that was happening in my mind, I was trying to soothe my soul with country music and transcendental folk – messages to myself from a different place.”
East My Love, the resplendent, country-tinged 12th album by Current Joys, feels familiar. It’s meant to: the 12 songs contained within dive deep into the rich folklore of the American West to tell time-worn tales of love and trauma, heartbreak and spiritual renewal. Cast with a warm glow and finding Nick Rattigan tapping into some of his lushest, most high-fidelity production to date, it’s the kind of album that listeners could see themselves within, and, hopefully, keep close when they’re most in need of reassurance or escapism.
Preceding today’s release, Rattigan shared the tidal-wave lead single ‘California Rain,’ the heart wrenching ballad ‘They Shoot Horses,’ and the gorgeously layered ‘Lullaby For The Lost.’
CURRENT JOYS
EAST MY LOVE
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Current Joys – East My Love,
Tracklisting
01. Echoes of the Past
02. California Rain
03. Days of Heaven
04. Never Seen a Rose
05. Lullaby for the Lost
06. Oh, Sister
07. They Shoot Horses
08. Slowly like the Wind
09. Tormenta
10. Sister Christian
11. East My Love
12. Feelin’ Groovy
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