Producer Jacknife Lee is now sharing a brand-new single from his latest album project. “I’m Getting Tired”, featuring the vocals of Def Jam singer Earl St Clair and the iconic Beth Ditto, is the latest single to emerge from new LP “The Jacknife Lee”, due June 26.
“I’m getting Tired” is the follow up to recent single “Made It Weird”, which picked up BBC Radio 6 airplay from Chris Hawkins, Lauren Laverne and Steve Lamacq, as well as being added to the Radio X Evening Playlist. It is an impactful and gripping piece of work that races through bustling percussion and rasping brass to create an atmosphere of fevered intensity. Accompanying the single is an engrossing video that arrives peppered with slogans and news headlines, with viral videos cut up between footage of rioting and unrest, influencer culture and natural disasters. It is a visual representation of the anxiety-inducing world we live in. Discussing the record, Jacknife Lee comments:
I’d become obsessed with “Attica Blues” by Archie Shepp from 1972. The intensity is relentless. It’s for the head, heart and feet. It has dissent imbedded in its DNA. I wanted to reach even a little bit of that when I started this track. Earl St Clair has an incredible voice and came over to the studio to hang out. We ate, listened to some records including Attica Blues and then I played a beat I had. He wrote some words, sang and yelled on it and it became “I’m Getting Tired”. He captured the frustration and exasperation we were feeling with what was happening in the States.
“The Jacknife Lee” is a new album featuring Genesis Owusu, Earl St Clair, Beth Ditto, Sneaks, Haviah Mighty, Petite Noir, Muthoni Drummer Queen, Bibi Bourelly, Barny Fletcher, Aloe Blacc, and Open Mike Eagle.
I’d been working with Beth Ditto for a while. She has one of the most soulful voices of our time. I’m a crazy fan of her voice… all punk gospel wildness. I didn’t want to ask anyone that I was producing to be on the record because I didn’t want to blur any lines and my original idea was to work with people I didn’t know and then I thought she would turn this into something really, really special. And she did.
It is an album with its roots in unpredictability. Lee freely admits that he had no intention of even making a record. However, with so much time spent inside what he calls the “studio bubble”, he began to write letters to a variety of artists, to express his admiration and thank them for the great work they were doing. It is here that the story of “The Jacknife Lee” begins, as intermittent pockets of studio time, WhatsApped beats and verses, and organised “blind dates”, turned into the relationships that would form a lovingly curated record.
I like repetition. Things don’t change much in the track but just works for me. Now we’re in lockdown the lyric has another connotation for me which we explored with the video. I watch news on my phone and get saturated with it. How did these numbskulls get to stand at the podiums? When we wrote the song we were frustrated at these dolts in their ascendancies now here they are. When it gets too much for me, I end up watching people doing dumb shit on Instagram as a counterweight, oscillating between the two. That’s my screen time. That’s the video. Catastrophe and cats. ~ Jacknife Lee