New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Amanda Bergman will release her new album Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever on June 7, 2024 via CowCow / GG Records. Following previously shared lead singles 'Wild Geese, Wild Love', 'Day 2000 Awake', 'Poor Symmetry' and 'Cities', today, she has followed up with new single 'My Hands In The Water'.
"Grief is very primal. it's like getting infested by a power that either will eat you or lead you depending on how you ride it," says
Amanda of the new track. "It's about processing the acceptance of the fact that people you love are going to die. We are tricked into moving very far from death when it's not acutely in our eyesight, on our schedule. That can be very limiting. It's lovely to take someone for granted, but relations that have a calmness about the fact that they will not last forever probably leaves you a better person."
This calmness and acceptance radiates through 'My Hands In The Water' which despite plumbing heavy subject matter finds light and warmth over its skittering percussion in Amanda's rich yet lighter-than-air voice.
Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever contains within it a remarkable breadth of all that life can throw at a person, winnowed down into welcoming, approachable miniatures. Painted in lush, orchestral brush-strokes that spread like the vast expanses of Amanda's home on a working farm in rural Sweden, or bring into focus the detail of the lessons learned (or learning) across a career as a musician, an environmental activist, a farmer, and a mother. This is held together by a rare voice - one with a warmth that strikes right to the heart and a distinctive texture that makes it like no other.
In the years following the release of her debut Docks - a success in her native Sweden but due to its limited release a record destined to become a lost classic elsewhere - Amanda's life has undergone dramatic change. Initial years were spent touring both her own music as well as with Swedish band Amason who won numerous GRAMMY´s and headlined festivals like the world famous
Way Out West in Gothenburg. She supported and found fans in a wide community of musicians and artists including the likes of
Bon Iver and
First Aid Kit (many of whom write
Amanda regularly wondering about new music). It wasn't long though before she packed this life up and started up her farm, not only a fully working farm which she and her partner
Petter Winnberg run together, but one which is trailblazing in its approach to sustainable and ethical farming. This initially didn't leave much space for music. Add two kids (in the space of 1.5 years) into the mix and there's even less.
Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever is the hard-won result of
Amanda finding the space for music again and of re-finding her own place in the world. "Music can, in short moments, be the answer to life", she says, "It has the ability to fulfill one in that way. Turn seconds of life that would otherwise pass inevitably to meaningful, transcendent ones. I mean what would humanity be without music? To me it's very fundamental. It's not just because I find it enjoyable. It's because I truly depend on it and believe in it".
