OXBOW RELEASE "THE NIGHT THE ROOM STARTED BURNING" VIDEO + U.S. TOUR DATES THIS FALL
Photo Credit: Phil SharpThe inimitable four-piece OXBOW announce their first new music in six years with the anticipated release of Love’s Holiday. With just over one week until Oxbow kicks off their European tour. The band shares a video for "The Night The Room Started Burning," which was directed by Chris Purdie.
The song appears on their new album, Love’s Holiday, out now via Ipecac Recordings.
Previous OXBOW albums found their impetus in a lyrical framework provided by vocalist Eugene Robinson, with guitarist Niko Wenner applying his musical compositions to the singer’s narratives. But Love’s Holiday began with the music. “The music was chiefly inspired by and written for my family. We’ve had two children born and my father died while writing and working on this record,” Wenner says. “The songs are just a collection of music that I sang to my babies and then wrote guitar parts for and brought to the band as OXBOW songs ” Love, the guitarist confirms, was the organising principle behind these songs, even if they still carry the band’s signature brand of drama and conflict.
“Lyrically it’s a purposeful take on Johnny Hartman’s ‘The Day the World Stopped Turning’ but instead of the power of love to alter our proximal relationships it’s, in my mind, all about the incendiary nature of such love. It fulfills specifically because it fills you with that which burns. And that’s something that absolutely no one slow walks.”
“I began the music for ‘The Night The Room Started Burning’ on my fathers old folk/classical nylon string guitar, a tune to amuse my young son. My mother played clarinet in high school but it was my father who took me to see my first string quartet concert in Seattle when I was a kid, and who inspired my love for classical music. Including, as an influence heard in this song, baroque period music. What’s not to like about baroque music? You can dance to it, it’s got a beat! And you can hear the steady dance rhythm in Room Burning. And a bit of baroque style in the way the guitar line sounds like two voices in a call and response, first higher “bah bah dee bah dee dee,” and the second, lower, answering the first and going down “BAH BAH BAH.” And of course the choir. ”
Make sure to catch them on tour
