Kevin Bronson on May 14th, 2020

0

There are few things — musically, anyway — that make one feel more in the moment than pristine vocal harmonies.

At that, L.A. trio Distant Cousins excel. Ami Kozak, Dov Rosenblatt and Duvid Swirsky have spent seven-plus years making folk finery, with their songs finding a home in myriad TV shows, films and ads and their craft fully realized on their 2019 album “Next of Kin.”

On June 26, they will release “Here & Now,” a live visual album made earlier this year at Boulevard Recording. It boasts acoustic versions of tunes from 2015’s “Distant Cousins” EP and from “Next of Kin” — plus two new originals. The show-stopper is “Here & Now,” which features guest vocals from Nashville’s Lindsey Ray.

The song, the trio explains, materialized just two weeks before the coronavirus shutdown. “We wrote the song about appreciating only what you have in the moment, realizing that despite all of our big plans, nothing is owed to us and all we have is here and now,” they write. “By the time we were ready to record the song, we were all at home in quarantine, so we each recorded our own parts and filmed ourselves and that is the final recording and video. Though it wasn’t written specifically about coronavirus, all of the lyrics take on a whole new meaning for us, especially, ‘Learning to hold the good and the bad and make peace with them both.’”

Here’s the Zoom-style video.

||| Watch: The video for “Here & Now”

||| Previously: “Lights On,” “For a Moment,” “Your Story,” “On My Way,” “Raise It Up”

||| Also: Stream “Next of Kin” in its entirety