A.O. Gerber, is back with her hopeful new track “Looking for the Right Things”, which was co-produced by Madeline Kenney and is released through Father/Daughter Records (US) & Hand In Hive (UK).Along with the news, Gerber has also announced a run of West Coast tour dates supporting Juana Molina.

Gerber’s debut LP Another Place To Need (2020) saw Gerber collaborate with much of her musical community in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, including Sasami, Madeline Kenney, Marina Allen and Noah Weinman (Runnner).

Speaking on the track, A.O. Gerber says: “I wrote this song in 2017 in a moment of exasperation, when my desire to show up as my honest self and let someone else show up as theirs felt impossibly difficult. That refrain, “Looking for the right things,” was a sort of anxious plea — this looping frustration over the distance between intention and reality, the desire for closeness and the complexity of actually allowing it. We tried to record this song for my first record and we couldn’t get the production right (irony!). As the years went on, I tried again and again to re-work it, and the repetition of that refrain started taking on new meaning. There’s anxiety in it, yes, but there’s also gentleness, self-nurturance, and even some hope — this feeling that it’s worth it to stay open, stay tender, stay messy.

When we pick apart the pieces of our past, and turn them over in our hands, they can feel weighted, worn, and weathered with the smog of perspective. And as we try to stitch them together, how do we navigate our own pattern when what we might’ve been taught is too binary, too black and white, a thread woven too tight?

A.O. Gerber carefully grapples with the constraints she was taught as a child to reach for the flourishing that comes when we look past the black and white, and into the gray gauze of the in-between. “I was thinking about how damaging it can be to exist in that binary space of good and evil,” Gerber explains. “When we see everything in either/or’s, we lose the nuance and complexity that make life rich enough to be worth living.” By interlocking memory and imagination, Gerber crafts a gleaming future, where the light and the dark don’t just coexist––they create a new color entirely.

On “Looking for the Right Things,” the production thrives under an electro-pop blanket, as bright percussion and sharp, vivid keys give rise to Gerber’s warm, velvet-smooth vocals. “I just wanna feel clean / I’m missing someone I knew once / Now she doesn’t exist,” she croons, charting the push-and-pull between wanting to be good, and the seeming impossibility of it. We are always at odds with ourselves, and “Looking for the Right Things,” peels back the desire to attain this idea of goodness while reckoning with the reality of our humanness, and the beauty of our imperfections. “As much as I’d like to make relationships as simple as figuring out how to be ‘good’ and that being enough, it’s always messier than that.”

A.O. Gerber 2022 Tour Dates

5/3 – Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern*
5/4 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios*
5/6 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent*
5/7 – Los Angeles, CA @ Troubadour*
5/13 – The Great Escape Festival, Brighton, UK:

-The Line of Best Fit Stage @ One Church
-Hand In Hive x Sub Pop Publishing stage @ The Mucky Duck

*supporting Juana Molina

Order Looking For The Right Things by A.O. Gerber HERE