Mirah first made waves way back in 2000 with her debut You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This, an album that established the then-Olympia-based artist as a fixture of the mid-'90s Pacific Northwest indie rock scene. (Phil Elverum co-produced it, and K Records released it.) Now based in Brooklyn, Mirah got a lot more ears on her music in 2020, when New York's Double Double Whammy issued a new expanded edition of You Think It's Like This featuring covers by some of the artists she's inspired -- Flock Of Dimes and Hand Habits, to name just a couple. Today, Mirah has returned with her first new music in seven years, the single "Catch My Breath," and it also features Flock Of Dimes' Jenn Wasner and Hand Habits' Meg Duffy.
"Catch My Breath" sounds way bigger and more polished than the lo-fi recordings Mirah was releasing 25 years ago, but the amped-up atmosphere pays off. It's inspired by '80s power-pop with lots of great vocal harmonies, shimmery synths, and razor-sharp electric guitars. Lyrically, it's about wanting to work through a rough patch in a relationship: "Now I’m not saying I didn’t contribute/ To this shitty stupid fucking mess we’ve gotten into/ I’m just saying I’m not ready to give up on anyone." Mirah says in a press release:
When this song first came out it had a sonically pensive aura. I could tell it was a keeper, but I wanted to try some different presentations, play with it a little. Could the wound spring of questioning and longing and relationship anxiety sound bombastic, or fun, or like an '80s pop song? That's what we went for in the studio, and with Jenn, Meg, and Andrew Maguire in there with me it really just took off. I love how the song expressed its malleability to me and then took so well to the treatment.
Listen to "Catch My Breath" below.
