Today’s video premiere features the latest single from vocalist-composer Majel Connery, “Pretend to Cry.” New Music audiences are likely to have encountered Majel’s work through the performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical, though she also performs as a solo artist and as part of the Bay Area vocal-violin duo Hae Voces.
Here’s what Majel had to say about “Pretend to Cry:”
There was a dark period in my life where someone important to me became a stranger. The desire for closeness is so strong in some people that it drives them to suffocate the ones they love. “Pretend to cry” is about liberating myself from a relationship that turned toxic. It’s about the freedom to walk away.
“Pretend to Cry” is available on Bandcamp, and you can catch Majel touring her debut EP Anything Chartreuse in New York in October.
New York Tour Dates
Oct 19: Soho House party
Oct 20: Williamsburg House party
Oct 25: Zingara Vintage, Far Rockaway
Oct 26: Washington Heights House Party
About Majel Connery
Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer and roving musicologist. Her music has been called “thoroughly Schubertian” by the Wall Street Journal, and her voice “crystalline” by the Chicago Reader. Most recently, Connery wrote songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for five episodes of Radiolab’s “Gonads” series. Connery performs and records most frequently with NY-based performer/composer collective Oracle Hysterical, and as a solo artist. She is currently touring her debut EP, Anything Chartreuse, called “dreamy art pop with the sensitivity and nuance of classical music” (Second Inversion).
After moving to the Bay Area in 2013 to take an assistant professorship in musicology at the University of California Berkeley, Connery left academia in 2015 to pursue a career as a professional musician. Since then, as Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford (2017-18), she commissioned and performed Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s “Contriving the Chimes,” written for Connery and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and staged by opera director Christopher Alden. In 2016, as Mellon Visiting Artist at Wellesley, she commissioned and performed Aeolus, a throat-singing rock opera by Rome- and Berlin Prize-winning composer Ken Ueno. This past spring, Connery co-taught a “Voice” seminar at Princeton with poet & collaborator Jeff Dolven.