Patrick McCormack
Singer/songwriter Henry Jamison is back today with "Gloria," the first song of his upcoming album Gloria Duplex out February 8th on Akira Records. It's another solid entry in his rich and folksy catalogue. According to Henry, the verses of “Gloria” take their melody from a folk song called “Arthur McBride,” which is an Irish anti-war ballad in which two cousins resist the attempts of army recruiters.
In an email to The FADER, Henry discussed the song's origins and explained the song's heavy intensions. "I’ve never used a folk melody before, but I loved Paul Brady’s version of the song so much that I learned it and found myself singing my own lyrics to it," he said. "I realized that I was writing a parallel story about the ways in which boys in our culture are “recruited” into a toxic fraternity, by each other, by their fathers, by video games etc. I try to sing myself and others out of a simple resistance to the nefarious male ego and into a sense of inviolate self-worth."
"The song serves both as a kind of title track and as a loose thesis statement. The record itself often seeks to bring nuanced understanding to the current state of (white, American) men, but “Gloria” is it as its most unapologetically aspirational."
Listen below.