Ahead of Friday’s release of their long-awaited fifth studio album, Ōtepoti based indie-folk songsmiths The Broken Heartbreakers have shared the album’s title track, ‘Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving,’ as an early digital single, alongside an official visualiser. The song, written by Rachel Bailey and John Howell, takes its title (and its single lyric) from a phrase the pair have carried between them for over twenty years, born on a late-night drive home from an out-of-town gig.
“Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving is a meditation,” says Bailey. “The phrase comes from a conversation we had over twenty years ago, on a drive home from an out-of-town gig. The phrase can be taken literally or metaphorically. Imagine if we could just keep going…imagine if we could just keep playing music…imagine if we could just keep this car on the tracks…imagine if we just didn’t stop…imagine if we just keep driving and the road ends…
“There’s also something about not needing a destination,” she adds. “There’s actually a line in another album track; ‘Count Us In’ which also rings true for this song: ‘There’s nowhere to get to, it’s just the getting through.’”
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That idea, of movement without a fixed destination, threads through the album as a whole, and finds its clearest expression here in the record’s title track.
Of the musical composition Howell adds, “I layered a lot of guitar parts on this song – using different reverbs and EQ to put them in different spaces. Nick Roughan (Skeptics, Dimmer) did a really great job with the mixing.
“There are sampled strings which are a wee bit broken, but my favourite sound on this song comes in halfway through- it’s a Tuba put through a fuzz box.
“This mangled up brass reminds me of the sound of the Salvation Army band driving past on a flat bed truck playing Christmas carols. The most achy, sad sound of all time.”
Praise for The Broken Heartbreakers
Critical praise for the band’s earlier work has remained remarkably consistent throughout their career. Aotearoa music journalist and historian, Nick Bollinger described their self-titled debut as “a gorgeous album… soft but with substance, sonically rich and beautifully performed,” while Sunday Star Times music reviewer, Grant Smithies praised its “desert-dry wit, and melodies sturdy enough to hang your hat on.”
Their 2010 album Wintersun was described by the NZ Herald as “sad, touching and sunny winter music all in one”, while Bollinger later included How We Got To Now among his favourite New Zealand albums of 2015, praising the band’s ability to weave together “the personal and the political, the inner and outer worlds”.
The band’s fifth album, Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving, arrives this Friday 17 July on LP, CD and across digital services via Slow Time Records, the label founded by acclaimed songwriter Nadia Reid.
Led by songwriters Rachel Bailey and John Howell alongside drummer Paul McLennan-Kissel (Julian Temple Band, Entire Alphabet), with contributions from Craig Monk (Cloudboy, Mink, Dunedin Symphony Orchestra) on viola and electric guitar and bassist Angus McBryde (Asta Rangu), the album marks the band’s first full-length release in over a decade, following 2015’s How We Got To Now.
Reid says of welcoming the record to her label roster: “Rachel and John are such gifted writers, observers, singers, and players. These songs are the stuff of life, life on life’s terms. They sound like Dunedin, and Ireland, like K’Road. I’m so grateful that this record is joining Slow Time’s stable of records.”
The Broken Heartbreakers
Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving
Out July 17th Via Slow Time Records
1. How Long Is Too Long
2. When Your Eyes Meet Mine
3. What Is For You
4. Matthew (Your Whites Are So White!)
5. Yesterday
6. Now That You Know
7. Count Us In
8. An Ocean in the Way
9. Call Me Back
10. Dangerous Age
11. Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving
Aotearoa/NZ September Tour Dates
Fri 4 Oamaru – Grainstore Gallery
Sat 5 Christchurch- Space Academy
Thur 10 Auckland – Whammy!
Fri 11 Waiheke – Artworks Theatre
Sat 12 Wellington – Vogelmorn Bowling Club
Sat 19 Dunedin – Hanover Hall
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