“I thought love meant hurting / For it to be working just right / And I thought love meant holding / Onto the very thing / That clipped those wings from flight.” So sings Asheville songwriter Natalie Jane Hill on ‘I Thought Love Meant’, the latest single from her new full-length Hopeful Woman, coming this March on Dear Life Records. The song might be the closing track of the collection, but it proves a fitting introduction. One rooted in everyday existence, searching for some higher truth not within grand gestures or stark experience but the gradual change in our souls and bodies as minutes become hours, hours become days. The setting of each track tends to be humble. A kitchen table, a small pond. The tone often observational or else reflective, attuned to the small ripples present within any occasion or interaction. Those moments we miss one another when trying to speak. The beliefs we form and hold and drop.
Within this context, it is tempting to view ‘I Thought Love Meant’ as a kind of epiphany. The conclusion which sets out the wisdom gleaned up to now. The track which sets out exactly what love means after all. But while there is an undoubted clarity within the lush yet understated arrangement and Natalie Jane Hill’s delivery, the insight here is that no such realisation could ever be reached. Love cannot be defined or explained away, even appears to actively resist such attempts. Like an apparition shimmering on the edge of your vision which shifts should you attempt to look at it directly. Love is a mystery. That’s the conclusion Hill offers with Hopeful Woman. It will grow bigger and smaller according to rules beyond your understanding. Accepting this fact is the only path to being okay.
Watch the video filmed at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern North Carolina below, directed and edited by Spencer Kelly, along with director of photography Gray McClamrock and colorist Kyle Messina:
Hopeful Woman will be released on the 6th March via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Charlie Boss, album painting by Bobbye Fermie