Tomberlin has shared the video for her new single from the forthcoming second album i don’t know who needs to hear this…, out via Saddle Creek on April 29th. An unconventional love song to the power of healing, ‘sunstruck’ is a charming single and the fourth to be released from the new album.
“This is an aerial view love song that is also not a love song. It is more a love song to forced distance, time alone with yourself, letting go, searching for yourself and the healing that takes place when you make those things an active focus in your life,” says Sarah Beth Tomberlin.
“These things are choices, they don’t just happen on their own. You can choose to practice them or you can choose stagnancy. This is a love song to the growth that often can take place if you choose to tend to your own life’s garden.” See the video below.
The new album follows on from her debut, At Weddings. The songs on that record developed over the period of a couple of years, where Tomberlin was living at home in rural Illinois. After leaving home to move to Louisville, Kentucky, she worked a day job and kept writing songs. The demos that she posted on Bandcamp came to the attention of Saddle Creek and the process snowballed from there. Less than year after her first live shows, Tomberlin was performing on the Jimmy Kimmel show in L.A. The surroundings inspired her to move again, and it was ‘The City of Angels’ that inspired her 2020 E.P Projections.
“My first record, I made it without knowing I was making it,” she says. “I was writing songs to process stuff from my personal life as it was happening, and then suddenly everything was happening really fast. Record label, tour, press, all this momentum and a lot of advice about my career, which, you know, I never even expected to have. So I think when I started to write the second record, I felt a lot of pressure to make it sound collected and profound, almost like a book—chapters, a narrative, everything nicely wrapped up.”
Her process of creating songs can be inspired from internal monologues: Often, she says, she will open a notebook to jot down a line or phrase only to find a whole song in her mouth, almost as if it was pre-formed. Later she’ll decide whether it means anything or not. “Questions last forever,” she says. “A lot longer than answers do.”
Tomberlin hits the UK and Ireland as part of her European tour at the end of April and start of May. Tour dates are:
29 Apr Nottingham – Rough Trade
1 May Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
2 May Manchester – Yes (Basement)
3 May Edinburgh – Voodoo Rooms
4 May Birmingham – Cuban Embassy
5 May London – St Matthias Church
6 May Cardiff – Clwb IFor Bach
7 May Brighton – Kmedia Studio
8 May Dublin – The Grand Social
Photo: Michelle Yoon
