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New Music from Irish Indie Folk Group Tupelo

June 11, 2021

Tupelo are James Cramer and Kevin Duffy. ‘Safety Light’, out now, is the first single from their next album.

James says, “Since last year I’ve been watching the young adults missing out on their youth and those brilliant vital years that connect being a teenager and growing into a young adult. It’s that small window in your life where your commitments are just not there yet but they’re coming. They’ve all missed out on a year’s summer, the lockdown came with rules without a filter with online school and online relationships. Missing out on that promise of young love that is your major rite of passage and such an important part of growing up that can lead to having a deeper capacity for caring, empathy and communication and to be able to understand what good relationships are and how to create one.

I wrote the song on my very first guitar which I got when I was 10 and I got it fixed up last year just before lockdown and it’s the guitar that features on the recording. It gave me a connection back to my youth soon as I started playing those nylon strings and I could feel the 10 year old songwriter trying to figure it out all over again, which led me to writing ‘Safety Light’ thinking about the lost summers and those magic nights that young adults are missing out on that I had. I hope the song will ring true for people of all ages going through various things at the moment and the song to be a ‘Safety Light’ for the listener.

The video for the song is about a day in Dublin during the pandemic.

James says “I hadn’t been outside my 5k in a long while, it was day 300 and something of lockdown and this was the first day I ventured into town and I stuck the camera on the bike and let it go uninterrupted. It wasn’t to be perfect film, it was to have the bumps we’ve had, the jerky months of uncertainty we’d all had and I noticed the city I was brought up in had changed. It made me want to go back a few years when it was all “normal”. It made me miss the laughter, the motion of a busy city and just the craic we had. I ventured around places of my youth to see how they were. It made me think of leaving things you love when you’re young is easier but as time goes by you realise your love is not as strong as your reason for leaving. I suppose we all reach for a safety light at some point, once you find one it will fill your heart in one breath.

Tupelo.ie

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