‘Don’t Drive Into the Smoke’ by Uma Bloo | Album Premiere
Today, Uma Bloo — the project of Chicago musician Molly Madden — shares their brand new album, ‘Don’t Drive Into the Smoke’, out today via Earth Libraries.
Speaking on the album, Molly Madden wrote: “When I started writing the songs that ended up making the album, I didn’t know I was writing an album. I started playing guitar when I was eight years old and it was then I knew I wanted to be a songwriter. Unfortunately, music and art didn’t tie in with my family’s values, so there was a lot that stood in the way of me exercising my abilities and desires. So, I was an on again, off again musician until I got to Chicago at eighteen. Once I accepted the fact that I wanted to create my own music, these songs started pouring out of me in an effort to unpack the life I had and what I thought I wanted to build. In a lot of ways, this album has been in process since I was eight years old without me fully knowing it. So, I’d say this album was inspired by fate and how when you acknowledge destiny you cannot deny it, although that truth doesn’t always result in peace.
At the time I was writing the songs, I thought I was trying to understand myself romantically. What was I like to love, what did I need from it? But now that I have a number of years between myself then and now, I realize it’s an album largely about processing loss during a coming of age. I had been feeling like a life I desired was unattainable and living inside of a dream.”
With her latest album, Uma Bloo’s Molly Madden is trying to trick herself. Due March 23rd via Earth Libraries, ‘Don’t Drive Into the Smoke’ encapsulates a core of intense grief within layers of more familiar love and heartbreak. By opening her explorations in the form of immaculately layered indie rock epic, the Chicago-based artist and the listener can face the depths of pain together. “It’s about needing love so bad, getting shards of it here and there, and then watching yourself from above as you spill all over the place,” she says. “Love and lust are great deceivers, fantastic distractions from getting to the heart of the pain.”
Headline photo: Monika Oliver
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