Born in the Pacific Northwest and currently based in the Midwest, Dani Lee Pearce has been musically active for over ten years, releasing a mammoth fifteen albums since her debut in 2011. Much of her music was written during a five year period of homelessness and draws on these difficult experiences, weaving them into richly textured songs alongside other inspirations that they say includes “fantasy, folklore, witchcraft, mythology, history, intense emotions, the spiritual, the mysterious and the macabre.”
Back in 2019, she released For As Briefly As I Live, a collection of quirky piano-based pop songs on Virginia mutual aid-oriented label Grimalkin Records which explored themes of love, death and commitment “from the perspective of a frequently shy, nervous, and lonely trans woman.” Next month, Dani Lee Pearce returns to Grimalkin Records to release a brand new album. Titled Spider Mountain, it looks to continue her creative evolution, from early no wave-influenced experimental compositions to what Grimalkin describe as “synth-rooted progressive pop with a distinct queer ethos.”
Today we are sharing the record’s second single, ‘Foxhood and Twink Lucifer’. Opening with lush, crystalline synths, the song soon morphs into something unabashedly dramatic and impassioned, drawing on left-field pop icons from the last half century. It’s a track that weaves its own mythology, full of strange dream-like logic and oblique imagery. Whether the events it describes are literal or allegorical seem besides the point, but regardless, this is not some timid reverie. There are serious barbs built into the sound, specifically ones pointed at the callous parts of society. “A rich man is a bitch man, this we know,” Pearce sings at the close, “a rich man is a snitch man, this we know too.”
