Durand Jones pens a love letter to being Black, queer and from the rural South
Durand Jones & the Indications have been making vintage soul cool again since the mid-2010s. But after several years, three albums and international tours, frontman Durand Jones felt the need to step out on his own.
When he approached his label, Dead Oceans, about releasing a solo album, he didn't explain what it might sound like. "Rather, it would smell like zesty magnolias on a hot July day in Louisiana," he says.
And so began Jones' journey to memorialize his hometown of Hillaryville, Louisiana, a small community on the banks. In an early interlude, over melancholy piano, strings and sounds of a creek, Jones narrates Hillaryville's history and how his grandmother described what it was like when she first moved there: "the place you'd most want to live."
