Kevin Bronson on May 13th, 2022

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New and out today, and here to get you through some moods: Singles from Jamie Drake, Remi Wolf and Alicia Blue …

JAMIE DRAKE, “New Girl”

Jamie Drake sounds anything but new on “New Girl,” the title track to her new album, arriving June 10 via AntiFragile Music. The follow-up to “Easy Target” and “Beginnings,” it’s a bossa nova-influenced track delivered with a sophisticate’s flair, as Drake takes a winking look at her vagabond childhood. “When I wrote it I was channeling my inner child’s experience of moving a lot as a kid and always being the new girl at school (which was nine times before the 5th grade),” she says. “I love how each verse charts the loss of something: friends, my dad, my faith — and how I’m always the new girl whether it’s literally or figuratively speaking. The positive side to this song is that with every new beginning, there is always a new life, which is one of the main themes of this album. As a kid, it was always stressful having to start over again (I even changed my name in the 2nd grade to Elizabeth). As an adult, I realize that death and rebirth are potentially an everyday occurrence if you want it to be; offering a chance at something new.”

REMI WOLF, “Michael”

Remi Wolf, the pop eccentric who can leap multiple genres in a single bound, has released the single “Michael” to stir interest in the June 3 release of the deluxe version of her 2021 hit album “Juno.” The new song, written with Aaron Maine (Porches) and Jack DeMeo, is sweetly sung grunge-pop tune, part barbed wire and part picket fences. “When I was writing the song, I was just free-styling and letting words fall out,” she says. “The meaning has come to me now after a couple months. The song paints a picture of a manic and obsessed woman who craves the high she gets from Michael’s attention and is willing to delve deep into an masochistic toxic pit to get it.” Haley Appell directs the video for the song, and Wolf says: “I wanted the video to really paint a picture of this lady running around the city trying to find Michael. We filmed run-and-gun style in Argentina while I was on tour there, it was a bit of a whirlwind, which in the end added to the mania of the video.”

ALICIA BLUE, “Dog Days in LA”

Echo Park showed up on Alicia Blue’s debut album “Bravebird” (2020), and Highland Park was the setting for the video for her 2021 single, “Blackbird.” Now the folk singer is all over Los Angeles in Tyler Dunning Evans’ video for her first single of this year, “Dog Days in LA.” She’s now based in Nashville, today’s announcement tells us, and Blue says the new tune — the first from the new EP “Inner Child Work” (out July 15) — is “about her realization of how much she didn’t have her life in California figured out.” In fact, she says, “Each song on ‘Inner Child Work’ is really just about the difficulty of navigating this life and not having all the proper tools to live it in the most successful way. And by successful, I mean the ‘healthiest.’ I like to think that getting this all out helps me in some way.”