Track Premiere “Be Free” a new song by King Dude & Chelsea Wolfe
The hypothetical Venn Diagram of Chelsea Wolfe and T.J. Cowgill would have a dense gravitational pull towards the center; for the past several years, both artists have worked with charred, neo-folk instrumentation, a gothic warble, and at times the spirit of an old country jukebox. “Be Free” is the pair’s new collaborative 7” from the Not Just Religous Music label—helmed by the Gira-reminiscent Cowgill, aka King Dude—and again proves their voices to be complementary. It’s a cold, sad, fiercely-strummed march, booming open and closed like Wolfe’s staggering Pain Is Beauty LP. “Don’t you dare take my hand if you want to be free,” Wolfe and Cowgill sing to one another, articulating the sentiment in various iterations. It’s a timeless negotiation between desire and emotional freedom and the necessity of not looking back, and also one of the most direct pieces of songwriting either artist has casted out.