Pillow Queens "Leave The Light On" LP (2022)
Details: 180gm heavyweight black vinyl in a gatefold sleeve designed by Nicole Rifkin. Pillow Queens sophomore album, "Leave The Light On," released on Royal Mountain Records in 2022. New stock, sealed.
Description: “All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” – Maggie Nelson, Bluets
When Pillow Queens set about recording their second album, before, after and during, great spaces were opening. The pauses in living and connection were profound. And so, they went two places: within, and towards each other.
Leave the Light On is an exploration of the uncertainty of emotions as they are in process, and an intuitive outpouring of ideas as they form. It’s about being intimately honest with yourself and as a band. It’s about trusting that this state of vulnerability can be held as it emerges, by you, by us.
What do queer dream blues sound like? More importantly, what do they feel like? Leaving home at night, driving through the black back roads until the tungsten light starts to glow. “Uaigneas an chaldaigh”, the Irish sense of loneliness experienced on the shore. The confusion and discombobulation of waking and feeling unfamiliar.
The liminal space between dreaming and being conscious. The unmooring that happens when a sense of self is being explored and sometimes slipping away.
But gravitating towards the unknown and the ambiguous can often yield the kinds of sounds and feelings that provide creative certainty, where the art is coming to you, as much as you going to it. Leave the Light On fills vast new sonic plains for Pillow Queens. It’s an album that encourages duality; to be soft and hard, delicate, and muscular, intimate and anthemic, alone and together. Collaborating on lyrics, a shared emotional experience fills these songs of hope and home, insecurity and estrangement, songs that track time passing and a sense of reflection that grows deeper every day.
When real movement is stillness, when to be stationary feels transitionary, and when the most vital journey in life is to go within, then it’s time to leave the light on, and open up."
Grade: M (new stock, sealed)
TRACK LISTING SIDE A:
A1. Be By Your Side
A2. The Wedding Band
A3. Hearts & Minds
A4. House That Sailed Away
A5. Delivered
TRACK LISTING SIDE B:
B1. Well Kept Wife
B2. No Good Woman
B3. Historian
B4. My Body Moves
B5. Try Try Try