Lead single ‘Summer in Your Mouth’ introduces the new album’s direction, offering a literate and impassioned picture of seasonal depression amid changing seasons on the prairie. Not that lead Joel Stretch necessarily set out to write a song about such themes. “The title of this song references an Al Purdy poem called ‘Transient’ about travelling across Canada by train as an adolescent,” Stretch explains. “The opening lines are about crossing the prairies ‘so close to the violent sway of the fields it’s like running and running naked with the summer in your mouth.’ I borrowed that line as a starting point for this song.”

The song’s direction was decided by a matter of circumstance. Because Starpainter were writing within a long prairie winter, meaning Purdy’s image took on a newfound resonance. What emerged was a song which longs for the season on the other side of the spectrum, unfolding with a slow-burning richness that holds onto the promise of change as one might the sensations of a fond dream. Or, as Stretch puts it, “an ode to summer that I wrote in the dead of winter.”

Rattlesnake Dream is out on the 2nd June via Neon Moon Records. Pre-order it now via the Starpainter webstore.

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