“Hard To Realize” Purr

Purr are the duo of Eliza Barry Callahan and Jack Staffen. Their debut album Like New, was produced by Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, Father John Misty, Whitney, The Lemon Twigs) at his East Los Angeles studio. The full-length will be released on February 21, 2020 via ANTI-. Watch the new video for the song “Hard To Realize.” In the clip, Eliza sees Jack outside a Chinatown window and with the flip of a coin, the reality of the city is blurred with a surreal daydream sequence.

The full-length was written in the band’s basement studio in downtown Manhattan, a repurposed storage space beneath a restaurant in the building where Callahan once lived as a young child—thanks to the goodwill of the very last kind landlord in New York City. In the territory of a New York City upbringing, Callahan sites her late close friend and old next-door neighbor, whom she met on the sidewalk when she was eight, the jazz guitarist Jim Hall, as her primary influence in music and life.

From Purr: “We wrote the songs that make up this album at the outset of a transitional and particularly uncertain moment in our lives. That early twenties tide change. New patterns took hold as we tried to hang onto old ones. The songs each have their own stories — but at the time they were collectively written, we were dealing with a push and pull between dependence on and independence from people we love, and coming to terms with our own self-expectations. We were resisting and (sometimes) accepting of the inevitable changes in our relationships and friendships, a moment, a specific and strange time in our lives…and, of course, in this… world. That thread was just naturally pulled through the songs.”

Purr
Live Dates

11/21 – Brooklyn, NY – The Sultan Room

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