Songwriter/producer Tatum Gale announces his debut album, Pretty Green, with the single “Botanical Babe.” An infectiously fun, groovy houseplant-centered jam, “Botanical Babe” offers a glimpse of what to expect from Gale: wonderfully creative and innovative electronic art pop tracks full of life, textures, and personality.Peppered with analog flavored disco beats and a chorus featuring a lengthy and impressive list of plants, “Botanical Babe” is a lush, verdant track that was inspired by a friend of Gale’s with quite the green thumb. Sampled percussion serpentines around Gale’s autotuned vox as boisterous, hip-shaking synth furnishes the track with a healthy serving of kinetic energy, joining textures novel and retro in lockstep.
The songs on Pretty Green, the debut record by songwriter-producer Tatum Gale, began as reactions: against self-destruction, against the musical landscape young artists create in, against the callous indifference of the world at large, and in some ways, against the self. Yet it’s from this reductive headspace that Pretty Green assumed its vibrant dance-pop shape, taking form as an uncompromising, synth-driven response to life’s myriad cruelties that finds joy in the fact there are still things worth fighting for. The album is a glass-half-full assessment of Gale’s desire to care for those closest to him, even as that desire clashes with his personal shortcomings, both as an individual and as an artist.“Pretty Green as a title is meant as an expression of hope that the Earth can, in fact, be saved, and that you must carve out your own ways to support yourself and those you love,” Gale says. “But it’s also an acknowledgment of the artist’s relative helplessness—especially when you’re just starting out.”
In line with Green’s introspective qualities, Gale gave himself the space necessary to examine and reflect on both himself and his music, a process that began in an appropriately contemplative setting. Armed with just a defective Casio and the human voice, he began writing Green’s tracks during the summer of 2020 in the guest bedroom of his partner and collaborator Laura Jinn’s childhood Cincinnati home. From there, the work continued in Brooklyn, gradually metamorphizing from feverish, forthright demos into a maximalist lifework of indie synth—and similarly moving beyond its baseline Cincinnati Casio into warm Rhodes tones (recorded in NYC), as well as recordings of Gale’s performance on the piano in his childhood home in Portland, Maine. Graced by collaborators like Laura Jinn (“Poison Darty”) and building around the basslines of Wyatt Shapiro (“This is starting to feel good again”), as well as the drums of Jackson Price (“Your Day,” “Chickadee Eye,” “800m”) and the barn-burning sax of Dexter Moorse (“800m”), Green runs the gambit of electronic subgenera, incorporating found sounds, big beats, and satisfactory grooves in a coherent yet versatile package. The lead single off the album “Botanical Babe” Gale says, “is a big ‘80s dance tune, complete with a disco synth bass and a fat gated snare. It’s an ode to a friend with an impressive plant collection.”
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