J. Killen Shares ‘Cold Winds’ from Upcoming Album ‘Depression Dollars’
Los Angeles country singer-songwriter J. Killen returns with ‘Cold Winds’, a new song from his forthcoming album, ‘Depression Dollars’. The single is officially out August 21, but we’re pleased to share it a day early below.
J. Killen hasn’t wasted much time since releasing ‘Goin’ It Alone’ earlier this year. Its follow-up, ‘Depression Dollars’, comes from a different place, quieter and considerably heavier, with Killen writing his way through love, loss and the sort of uncertainty that doesn’t necessarily go away just because life has settled down.
‘Cold Winds’ gets to the heart of that without saying too much.
“Cold Winds is about letting go of fear when things feel uncertain,” Killen says. “Life is full of problems, but it’s ok to live with them.”
The arrangement follows the same idea. Acoustic guitar sits at the centre, with pedal steel, banjo, bass and drums filling the space around it rather than crowding the song. Killen isn’t trying to outrun what he’s singing about. The point seems to be accepting that trouble is part of the deal and learning how to carry it.
Elsewhere, Killen has described the song as coming out of a period of repeated heartbreak, not all of it romantic. By the time he wrote ‘Cold Winds’, he says, he was moving toward acceptance: you rarely know how something is going to affect you until you’re already in the middle of it.
‘Depression Dollars’ was recorded during winter in Portland, Oregon at Red Rockets Glare with producers Raymond Richards and Luke Messimer. Killen was staying in a basement apartment at the time, without a television, surrounded by grey skies and seemingly endless rain. He remembers the sessions themselves as quieter and darker than those for the previous record.
That atmosphere found its way into the songs. The instrumentation is deliberately limited to guitars, bass, drums, pedal steel, keys and fiddle, with the arrangements put together so the record can be played live without having to reinvent it onstage.
There is plenty of older country in Killen’s vocabulary. His father played country music, and Hank Williams and Bob Wills were part of what he heard growing up. Later came Dylan, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, followed by the alt-country records of Wilco, Whiskeytown and Ryan Adams that showed him another way into the music.
But ‘Cold Winds’ doesn’t particularly feel like an exercise in looking backwards. What makes it work is the plainness of it. Killen has been through enough to know that a song about hard times doesn’t need to make those hard times sound romantic.
That same thinking runs through ‘Depression Dollars’. Killen describes it as a record about “love, loss, and depression,” but also one where some hope remains. For someone who spent years away from making music with this kind of urgency, he’s now writing and recording at a remarkable clip.
“I have this idea of legacy,” he says. “I want to put out as many records as I can before I leave this world.”
Headline credit: Jonny Esser
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