Premiere: Little Reader, ‘Disappearing One’

Kevin Bronson on May 9th, 2017

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All praise the pop song with the ability to part the clouds without filling your gullet with sugar. And we’re talking about “Disappearing One,” the yearning new single from the duo Little Reader, the tag-team musical effort of Nashville’s Kate Tucker and L.A.-based Ross Flournoy. Or, as Tucker calls the collaboration, “an accidental love child.”

The pair — she with a history in Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden, he with Merge Records’ the Broken West and Apex Manor — first got their heads together at the behest of their publisher, to try a co-writing session. Both had written extensively for film and television, but this “was basically as blind a date as a co-write can be,” Tucker says. And something clicked. Eventually, they had the songs on “The Big Score” (due May 19), an album that will hit the sweet spot for fans of the Go-Go’s, Blake Babies and Tennis.

Of “Disappearing One,” Tucker says, “When I met Ross I remember thinking, ‘this guy is so sunny.’ He was literally golden from sitting in his garden every morning smoking cigarettes, and when we started writing together, it came through almost immediately in the form of pop melodies from a brighter place than any I’d known. Then I went to Joshua Tree last year and I was all alone. I was thinking a lot about ashes to ashes dust to dust and then I happened upon the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum and that was it, it was like an out-of-body experience. That’s the feeling I kept with me as we wrote this song.”

“The Big Score” was produced by Mark Watrous of the Shins. “By the time we got around to ‘Disappearing One,'” Watrous says, “the full record was starting to reveal itself. Kate, Ross and I sat down to arrange the song and we wound up at this point where it didn’t feel like it wanted to return to a chorus or a verse, it just wanted to explode and then let all the dust settle, which seemed very appropriate given the lyrical content. I think it’s really fun how the arrangement mirrors the story.”

||| Stream: “Disappearing One”