WUNC Music is excited to share 'Dream The Sun,' the first single from Durham'sThe Pinkerton Raid's fifth full length album, due out in early 2021.
PRESS RELEASE:
Durham’s The Pinkerton Raid was a sibling band for most of its existence, from the time Katie DeConto joined her brother Jesse's songwriting outlet in 2011 to the time their brother Steven left the band in 2018. The growth of the band coincided with Katie's building her own businesses: the grassroots, collaborative co-working space Mercury Studio and the local arts market The Makery. Just when the partners for those two businesses were joining forces and moving to a new location on Geer Street, which turned out to be susceptible to frequent flooding, the band was also releasing and touring on its second album.
"This all sounds very cool and exciting, but the pressure was intense and constant and a lot of things went wrong," says Katie. "I was in a pretty dark place, loving the work I'd made for myself, mostly helping others pursue their dreams, but waking up each day, feeling paralyzed by the weight. It was hard to feel anything but grief, disappointment, exhaustion and isolation."
Later, when the drainage problem was fixed and things had settled down at the merged business now called The Mothership, and with the band working on its third album, Katie thought about how she might have felt differently if she'd known with certainty that things would get better.
"When the night is at its darkest, we never doubt that the sun will come back," she says. "I wanted to have the same faith in my life that, even when things feel inescapably grim, nothing lasts forever."
So Katie got a tattoo on her right shoulder, a simple line drawing of the sun underneath a mountain range, before it rises.
"Even when you can't see it, the sun is still there, and getting closer every minute," Katie says.
When Katie finally quit the band in 2017, Jesse knew she was cutting things from her life that triggered the stress and the weariness. A year later, after he and a new band of collaborators had released its fourth album, Jesse noticed the commonality of his newest unrecorded songs all being written about close family relationships. He started leaning into that source material. Jesse wrote "Dream the Sun” based on Katie’s tattoo, a blessing and a hope for his sister to enjoy the peace of saying 'no' to things and the rest from constant struggle to create, build and achieve.
Jesse James DeConto
jesse@pinkertonraid.com
You can pre-save the song on Spotify and check out a live performance of 'Dream The Sun' here. You can also download the song from Bandcamp here.
