Jehnny Beth’s debut solo album, To Love Is To Live, is coming this May. The album’s first single ‘Flower’ is out now.
Jehnny Beth’s solo debut comes four years after Savages’ latest release, Adore Life. The catalyst for the album came four years ago, too, in the form of David Bowie’s final album Blackstar.
“Blackstar had a huge influence in terms of reminding me how an album can be a testament, an imprint of your vision of the world, and it will last longer than you will,” Beth told The New York Times.
To Love Is To Live will come out on May 8 2020. ‘Flower’ debuted last night on BBC Radio 6. “I really wanted to do a love song for a woman,” said Beth. “To me, women were in the distance [when I was younger] so it’s been liberating to write about them.”
Listen: Jehnny Beth – Flower
Savages stayed on tour until July 2017, but have been noticeably inactive since then. Beth has steadily been cultivating a solo career in the meantime. She recorded a one off single with The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas in late 2015; a cover of Sort Sol and Lydia Lunch’s ‘Boy/Girl’.
Beth also performed a few solo shows not long after the release of Adore Life, opening for PJ Harvey and joining the xx live onstage. In January 2017 Beth revealed she’d been in the studio with Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream. Photos proved the claim was true, but no recordings have surfaced as yet.
Beth featured on ‘We Got the Power’ from Gorillaz’s Humanz album in 2017. She performed with the band on The Graham Norton Show and even sat down on the couch for an interview afterwards. Since the completion of the Adore Life tour, however, Beth has performed live only twice.
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Watch: Gorillaz – ‘We Got the Power’ on Graham Norton
Beth released her debut solo single ‘I’m the Man’ in December 2019, but it won’t appear on the upcoming album. And what about the future of Savages? Beth told The New York Times, “If I feel like I want to do a punk record again, I’ll probably do it with Savages. It’s a great band with a soul, and that’s quite rare.”
