Wild Pink are back with another preview of their forthcoming fourth full-length “ILYSM“, coming October 14th on Royal Mountain Records. The album’s tender, twangy second single “Hold My Hand,” featuring Julien Baker, was inspired by an experience Wild Pink bandleader John Ross had while battling cancer—an ordeal the band reckon with at length on the follow-up to their acclaimed 2021 LP “A Billion Little Lights”.
“I wrote that song right after my first surgery, about lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under,” Ross recalls of the heartfelt “Hold My Hand” in a statement. “It sounds kind of arbitrary, and like it shouldn’t have been as impactful as it was, but I felt very comforted and wanted to capture that loving feeling in the song.” I knew pretty quickly that I wanted it to be a duet, and I’m super grateful to Julien for joining me on it. This was one of the first songs we rehearsed together as a band in the studio and David [Moore]’s piano part felt great almost immediately. There were a couple moments like that in the recording process where a song just immediately fell into place as soon as we started playing it.
The finished product is a quiet storm of emotion, with Moore’s arpeggiated piano figure and Dan Keegan’s brushed drums as its slow, but steady heartbeat. Ross strums an acoustic guitar and sings at just above a whisper, wondering, “Wherever I go when I go down / Will you be there when I come around again?” It’s only then that Baker joins her voice to his (on “To hold my hand”), a musical representation of the simple, but beautiful act of human togetherness that saw Ross through such fraught uncertainty. Moore’s piano and sustained lap steel eventually come to the forefront, like morning’s first rays of sunshine.
“Hold My Hand” follows “ILYSM’s title track, released alongside the album’s announcement in late July, on Royal Mountain Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 