GINA BIRCH - Trouble - CD [JUL 11]

CD

Legendary artist, Raincoats co-founder, songwriter, filmmaker, and feminist icon Gina Birch has announced her eagerly awaited second solo album, Trouble, arriving via Third Man Records on Friday, July 11.

The album sees Birch teaming up once again with GRAMMY® Award-winning producer and Killing Joke founding member Youth (Paul McCartney, The Orb, The Verve) and engineer/mixer Michael Rendall (Peter Murphy, The Jesus and Mary Chain) – the same duo who helped capture the rugged-yet-refined sound of her critically acclaimed 2023 solo debut, I Play My Bass Loud.

“The record title refers to all the mini revolutions that have occurred in my life,” says Gina Birch, “not following the usual paths, falling down holes, making the same mistakes over and over, trouble of being a young woman at a time our options were generally secretary, mother or sex worker. Trouble I’ve caused and trouble I’m in…"

Trouble is a patchwork of sorts: its 11 songs are not only eclectic in genre, but play like stitched-together vignettes, fly-on-the-wall scenes in which Gina describes meeting a stranger on a train, or a flare up with her teenage daughter, or the nostalgia of driving past a certain part of your neighbourhood that’s been unchanged for as long as you can remember. It’s the politics of the everyday, a work that is feminist not because of slogans or placards, but because it’s a candid portrait of a female artist simply existing. “It's a bit out there, a bit off the tracks, and I always like to go there,” says Gina about the album’s diaristic undertones. “I unofficially subtitled the album ‘Trouble I've Caused and Trouble I'm In’, so the songs are based around that feeling—that dangerous place to be.” 

As such, the connecting factor that links all the songs on Trouble together isn’t one single ideology or theme or topic, but Gina herself. It’s her vision, informed by her status as a rock icon, her voice as a forward-thinking artist, and her perspective as someone who just thinks life should be a bit of a laugh sometimes. For a musician who has had such an impact on her genre, it’s downright life-affirming to realize that she still has so much to share with her audience—and frankly, Trouble is just cracking the surface. “These songs came to me like a radio tuning, the airwaves going along, and I just plucked them out of the air. Something just clicks in the atmosphere, and I just take it. I'm not writing an opus about one thing. I'm writing an opus about being me.”

Tracklist: 

1. I Thought I'd Live Forever
2. Happiness
3. Causing Trouble Again 
4. Cello Song
5. Keep To The Left
6. Doom Monger
7. Don't Fight Your Friends
8. Nothing Will Ever Change That
9. Hey Hey
10. Sleep
11. Train Platform