Golden Guitar-winning Americana duo The Weeping Willows plunge headlong into 2021 with ominous new single ‘Black Crow’. Fresh from the red carpet of Tamworth’s CMAA Awards, where The Weeping Willows took home the 2021 Golden Guitar for Instrumental of the Year (for previous outing ‘Prelude’), partners in life, love, and song Andrew Wrigglesworth and Laura Coates delve into darkness once again with brooding new single‘Black Crow’.
Encroaching doom never sounded so sweet. Shivering with misgiving, ‘Black Crow ’finds its murderous protagonist inescapably fixed by the penetrating gaze of the titular bird–harbinger of his inevitable fate at the end of a rope. Bleakly arresting, it’s yet another unmissable taste of The Weeping Willows ’long-awaited third studio album.
Rooted in ageless country-folk tradition, ‘Black Crow’ deploys the most urgently up-tempo picking in The Weeping Willows catalogue to date: acoustic and slide guitar rippling like the surface of an inky tarn disturbed by a smoking gun or bloodied knife. It’s also eloquent proof that Andrew and Laura’s celebrated vocal harmony is as exquisitely suited to fatalistic tales of murder as it is to a delicate love song.
Recorded, engineered and mixed by Ryan Freeland ( Justin Townes Earle, Tift Merritt, Bonnie Raitt ) at Los Angeles’ storied Stampede Origin Studio, ‘Black Crow’ thrills with all the dark storytelling majesty of The Weeping Willows ’critically acclaimed second album Before Darkness Comes a Callin'. That album netted the duo four-star reviews from Rolling Stone,The Australian, and The Music, and confirmed The Weeping Willows as Australia’s foremost vivisectors of the human condition and the shadowy forces that bind us to the earth.
To accompany the release of ‘Black Crow’, The Weeping Willows are excited to present a very special animated film clip rendered in suitably austere blacks and greys and thrilling with foreboding. Since sweeping onto the stage with the intoxicating Till The North Wind Blows in 2012, The Weeping Willows have long ranked among Australia’s premier songwriters, lighting a path through the cloistered under-canopy and dim-lighted thickets of the soul.
Harnessing the traditional sounds and deft song craft of the likes of the Secret Sisters, Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, The Weeping Willows lead the way in Australia’s bustling alt. country-Americana scene. The Weeping Willows have performed at the sprawling AmericanaFest (USA),FolkAlliance International (USA), and the UK’s Maverick Festival, along with industry-leading local festivals from Port Fairy Folk Festival to Queenscliff Music Festival. Laura and Andrew have supported Americana luminaries Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real (USA), Iris DeMent (USA), Hayes Carl (USA), Eilen Jewell (USA), Kinky Friedman (USA), Kevin Welch (USA), Shane Nicholson, Bill Chambers, and Lachlan Bryan.
The Weeping Willows have been nominated for eight CMAA Golden Guitars, four Country Music Channel (CMC) awards, the National Live Music Awards (NLMA) award for Live Act of the Year (Country), the Group or Duo of the Year award at the Australian Independent Country Music awards, and the award for APRA AMCOS Australian Independent Country Music Single of the Year. Laura and Andy have taken home three Tamworth Songwriters Association (TSA) awards, and were shortlisted for APRA Professional Development Awards in 2017 and 2019.
Last year, the duo’s collaborative single ‘Too Far to Go’ with Matt Joe Gow topped the AMRAP charts for two weeks straight. Like the beady black eye of a raven,‘Black Crow’ is a timely reminder of the inescapability of fate.It’s yet another dramatic master work in The Weeping Willows’ incomparable songbook.
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