We haven’t had an Anni B Sweet album for 7 years. SEVEN. In between, we can naturally talk about tours, collaborations and an album shared with Los Estanques that is very vindictive and winner of multiple awards. But it won’t be until next October when we get our hands on ‘Alegría’, the successor to ‘Universe to be released’.
On that album Ana López worked with James Bagshaw from Temples, leaving songs as powerful as the unforgettable ‘Buen voyage’, and this is also the case with this next album. The single ‘Goodbye with Joy’ is therefore continuous.
‘Farewell with Joy’ delves into the psychedelia of the 60s, in which both Anni and James have found a home. The Beatles from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (1966) or those who later went to India (1968) could be a reference in the arrangements of this recording that wants to reclaim the decade “where the strange and the accessible coexisted without conflict.”
Less immediate than the aforementioned ‘Bon voyage’, a song that is approaching 10 million streams -although it should be 1,000-, ‘Goodbye with joy’ fulfills its function of helping us overcome adversity. Saying goodbye to the “bad memories” with good vibes, mellotron, and very punctual bursts of strings and electric guitar, making special mention of how much fun the artist and James have had in the studio. Because the best thing about the song are the vocal effects that have fallen into monosyllables as absurd as “que” and “de.” A breath of fresh air in a topic that was looking for exactly that: a little air.
Anni B Sweet recognizes – in a text distributed by Subterfuge – the song influenced by a “bad streak of those that leaves an echo” and the reading of André Breton:
«Breton’s surrealism spoke of something very simple and very strange at the same time: that reality is not as solid as it seems, that there is always a small crack through which another way of looking enters. It’s not about imagining new things, but about paying attention to what you normally overlook. Change the focus. That’s what I did: I started looking at other details, giving them more space and letting them grow. What was previously the background began to occupy the foreground. And with that small change, the memories moved too. They didn’t disappear, but they stopped being the only thing there was. They mixed, they deformed, they opened. Something appeared there that I did not expect: a form of joy. Not like euphoria or quick relief, but like a feeling of air. As if reality, by widening a little, left more space to be inside without drowning. “Farewell with joy” was born from that larger and more habitable place.
