Today, Thomas Cohen shares his video for “New Morning Comes”. According to director Victor Gutierrez the video was inspired by an “image of John Lennon sitting in the back of a limo, shot by Kishin Shinoyama. In the image, John is successful and alone, looking strong and sensitive at the same time. Death foreshadows the image. Still Lennon seems brave, especially for his solo work at the time that explored his emotions, his psyche, and shares his vulnerabilities.” The track is “Tom’s most personal of the three singles, so we wanted to bring elements of this into the video. In it, Tom is comfortably alone and moving on.” In Thomas’ words; ” The song is simple really, it’s about finding new hope out of hopelessness.”

Despite being just 21-years-old when his former band S.C.U.M amicably went their separate ways, Cohen’s life presented him with a different set of subjects to draw from. While his band may have broken up, his marriage and the birth of his two sons gave his songwriting a newfound focus and clarity. Where once he would have created oblique filters for his lyrics, Cohen was devouring the works of decidedly un-S.C.U.M like singer-songwriters such as Townes Van Zandt, Judee Sill, Van Morrison and alien-fixated late ’60s cult hero Jim Sullivan. Not that you would necessarily hear those artists echoed in Bloom Forever’s songs, it’s more that slowly and surely they pointed the way towards the ground where Cohen could find his own voice and speak with a directness he’d avoided in the past.

Bloom Forever is a chronologically ordered document of the songs Cohen wrote between 2012 and 2015. Capturing the spirit and atmosphere of Lee Hazlewood or Jack Nitzsche productions without employing orchestras, brass sections or the like, Bloom Forever’s gorgeously cascading chord sequences come via twinkling Fender Rhodes or tumbling acoustic guitars, augmented by delightfully free-flowing meanderings – be it the sublime saxophone solo on “Honeymoon”, “Hazy Shades”’ languid pedal steel or the Low-era Bowie synths that rear their head at the album’s close.

Of course, tragedy is also present on the record. In April 2014 the unthinkable happened. Cohen’s wife, Peaches died at their Surrey home aged 25, leaving him to raise their two small boys. Rather than turn his back on the record in grief, Cohen eventually decided to continue work on the album. Relocating to Iceland to write and record the rest of Bloom Forever and finding some kind of peace through the process.