New Music: Emily Afton – Lonestar

Emily Afton has described her new single Lonestar as coming from her journey to ‘find her queer identity and discovering her inner self’. You can check out the result of that emotional exploration below.

The track’s opening is a very intimate affair, with Afton’s vocals and an acoustic guitar to the fore, setting a very reflective tone which continues throughout. From there, the song takes lyrical and tonal references from classic 50s country and gives them a fresh and modern, perspective. As Afton sings of unrequited love, she expresses it through the most ordinary of metaphors: having a drink with the object of her affections. The track also pulls off another trick of classic country music: taking a sparse arrangement and giving it a more expansive, layered feel. The key the track is played in, as well as the tone of the melody, add to the everyday melodrama of the song; giving it an almost cinematic air.

Afton had this to say about Lonestar: “This song is my queer love ballad of catharsis. I don’t know exactly where it came from I know it was written sometime after my band had just returned from touring in Texas, where everyone was drinking Lonestar beer in the honky-tonks we went to (I had never had Lonestar before, being raised in California). I remember feeling that feeling of “cool, this is gonna actually be a good song!” right away when I sang the first line to myself about: “I just wanna be Lonestar drinking in an old bar with you. It’s not that it’s such an amazing lyric or anything, but it just really conjured a genuine feeling within me which felt honest, similarly to how I had felt in those honky-tonks on tour.”

You can stream or download Lonestar by Emily Afton on all major platforms including Apple Music. Why not give her follow over on Facebook or Twitter to keep up on news about new music, upcoming live dates and projects, and much more?