Just a couple of short weeks out from releasing her sophomore album, Any Shape You Take, Asheville-based singer/songwriter Indigo De Souza has powerful new single for us. Titled “Real Pain,” the song layers in literal yelps, cries, and screams from a chorus of anonymous voices — ones that she invited fans to send in via voice memo. The result is a highly cathartic track that captures the type of frustration many of us have been experiencing over the last year and a half.
“‘Real Pain’ is about facing grief and loss and having compassion for yourself in that space,” De Souza said of the song in a release. “It’s about learning to be unafraid of experiencing a full spectrum of emotion, and welcoming the way it teaches you and changes you.
“For one of the sections in the song, I put out an invitation for people to anonymously send me voice memos of ‘screams, yells, and anything else.’ I layered the voices on top of one another to embody a kind of collective experience. I felt an incredible catharsis hearing their voices stacked with mine. While we live such separate lives, we are connected in the way that we all navigate immense amounts of pain and love and fear in our bodies every day. It can be hard to be a person! It’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes. It’s okay to feel things fully and to allow others space to do the same.”
Listen to “Real Pain” above.
Any Shape You Take is out 8/27 via Saddle Creek. Pre-order it here.
