Gina Birch shares title track for ‘I Play My Bass Loud’
Next month, Raincoats bassist Gina Birch will strike out on her own for the first time with her debut solo album, I Play My Bass Loud. It will be the bassist’s first full-length album under her own name in her four-decade-long career.
We’ve already heard a preview of the new LP through the singles ‘Wish I Was You’ and ‘No Love’, the former of the two featuring former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore backing Birch up. Now we’re getting another preview of the album, this time with the title track ‘I Play My Bass Loud’.
As much a confirmation of Birch’s distinct musical style as anything else, ‘I Play My Bass Loud’ is four and a half minutes of noise, dance beats, funky low end, and pure joy. It’s a pretty silly song, with Birch giving a near-literal rundown of how she plays on a day-to-day basis, but hey, write what you know about I guess.
“The song is a celebration of bass guitar as a voice, simple or layered, pounding or dancing, or everything at once,” Birch explained. “A celebration of a shout, a yell from the window, and the I am Here, of a woman’s creativity on the bass guitar. I play my bass, my bass my bass my bass, I play my bass loud.”
The song also comes with a new video that celebrates some of the lesser-known women who are killing it on the bass these days. Birch is just one of a long line of women who have taken the bass and made it their own, and the video for ‘I Play My Bass Loud’ shows how the lineage continues to grow with someone like Birch leading the way.
“There are five women bass players performing in the video, Emily Elhaj (Angel Olsen), Hazel Rigby (TBHQ), Mikki Itzigsohn (Small Wigs), Staz Lindes (The Paranoyds), and myself,” Birch writes in a statement. “We shot the video in L.A. so the bass players in the video are not primarily the ones on the track apart from Emily Elhaj who plays bass with Angel Olsen and Gina B.”
Check out the video for ‘I Play My Bass Loud’ down below. I Play My Bass Loud is set for a February 24th release.
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