“I Refuse To Believe (You Could Love Me)” is the new single and video from John Murry, released today on Submarine Cat Records. The track is the latest to be lifted from Mississippi-born Murry’s forthcoming third album The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, out June 25 on new UK label Submarine Cat Records. The album was produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels, Aldous Harding, This Is the Kit) at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth. Basically, if you wanted to give the Pixies a heavy Brit-pop inspiration, you’d get this song.
“‘I Refuse To Believe (You Could Love Me)” has Murry venturing into the realm of unexplained disappearances – an English aristocrat and an Australian politician: “Lord Lucan, he could not tread water / Prime Minister Holt? He never came up for air.”
“Violence has been a big part of my life,” he says. “It has been inflicted on me in ways that I was unable to control as a teenager, and as a child. I grew up in a place that was violent. I grew up in Mississippi. I grew up in a way that forced me, in order to survive in a culture like that, to posture. You don’t realise until later that that becomes a part of the way you see the world. The world becomes this intrusive thing and you’re protecting yourself against it. I also realised early on that if you don’t fight you’re just going to have to fight more.”
Key to this was his relationship with his adoptive family (“They didn’t adopt me; they bought me. I had a very abusive childhood”), relatives of the writer William Faulkner, which led to the final verse of ‘Di Kreutser Sonata’: “I will prune this family tree / Cause there’s nothing left but greed / Blood money and property / Love doesn’t mean a thing / When your last name is Murry / And / Should been swindle.”
For “I Refuse,” Murry had some lighter themes in mind.
“This song is my take on what Ric Ocasek (RIP) from The Cars mighta written if he had been into those dark “UK Surf” era Pixies mixes and found himself a bit trapped in Kilkenny, Ireland, for some years and – while there – grew a bit more alienated, broke, maligned, and bored by the day, then week, then month, then years,” comments Murry. “Ric would’ve probably written something much catchier, but y’all catch my drift, yeah?”
Murray’s previous two albums had been responses to specific traumas: the centrepiece of his debut, ‘The Graceless Age’ – the astonishing ‘Little Colored Balloons’ – told of his near death from a heroin overdose; its follow-up, ‘A Short of History of Decay’, was recorded in the wake of Murry’s marriage failing. ‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’, coming six years after Murry left the US for Ireland, is the result of a period of stability, though in Murry’s case it’s all relative (“I think a lot of what we call contentment is delusional,” he observes).
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