"Slip in through the kitchen / Ringing round the edges / Tap on rinsing / Your kiss like it’s nothing / Freezing feeling / Hard as bone..."
The free falling daydreams and spinning heel turns of "Please" by Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and artist Otracami, aka Camila Ortiz, are exquisitely beautiful and perfectly poised, not too little, not to much, just perfectly balanced and unafraid. I am loving how the song is constructed, how musical measures and vocal phrasings walk, run, sprint and gently stumble too. Ortiz has a voice and vocal character that sounds artful but organically so. This is to say that I don't feel pretense or any kind of fakery to her performance. In fact, her storytelling, emotional reflections sound less like a performance than just feeling her feelings intently.
This from LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
[“Please” was written exactly two years ago this month and captures what Otracami describes as “a long, unsteady season of despair” at the turn of winter. The track centers on reclaiming solitude and the complicated, glorious clarity that comes from being alone—sitting with your emotions on your own terms. In a fitting detail, the final version preserves the sound of a door slamming from Ortiz’s original voice-memo demo, a moment that underscores the song’s emotional core: shutting the door and finally finding relief.]
This backstory that maybe riddled with self doubts but maybe finding out that loneliness can turn inward and the gut punch of being maybe too alone can turn into the kind of healing that you can only do absolutely on your own. Sure I am interpreting here but feel this as I absorb Ortiz's wonderful lyrics.
Slip in through the kitchen
Ringing round the edges
Tap on rinsing
Your kiss like it’s nothing
Freezing feeling
Hard as bone
Snow breaks off like breadcrumbs
Right words rarely find me
Grab your gloved hand
Suddenly it’s easy
Fleeting feeling
Coming home
I told him over and over
Please take the bed
He’s on the couch instead
I cover him
Very far from answers
Back and forth between them
Spinning dancers
Seconds from forgiveness
Leaking feeling
Windows closed
I don’t know what’s wrong
Could it take so long to know
Watching till he’s gone
Do I have to make him go
I turn it over and over
What happened next
The night is mine again
I suffer it
I told him over and over
Please take the bed
I start to pull the thread
Recover it
These expressed lyrics tumbling from Ortiz's lips, sometimes her vocal curling into a slight yelp or yodel or something and the way her vocal actually sighs one moment and then sings like a bird is pretty wondrous as the musical bed actually sways breathes in equally dreamy ways maintaining a great kind of sanguine groove and then not and then again, love the bass shapes too so much.
"Please" is the first glimpse (or maybe my first glimpse) of her sophomore album "Runoff" dropping on March 20th via Figure & Ground.
Ringing round the edges
Tap on rinsing
Your kiss like it’s nothing
Freezing feeling
Hard as bone
Snow breaks off like breadcrumbs
Right words rarely find me
Grab your gloved hand
Suddenly it’s easy
Fleeting feeling
Coming home
I told him over and over
Please take the bed
He’s on the couch instead
I cover him
Very far from answers
Back and forth between them
Spinning dancers
Seconds from forgiveness
Leaking feeling
Windows closed
I don’t know what’s wrong
Could it take so long to know
Watching till he’s gone
Do I have to make him go
I turn it over and over
What happened next
The night is mine again
I suffer it
I told him over and over
Please take the bed
I start to pull the thread
Recover it
These expressed lyrics tumbling from Ortiz's lips, sometimes her vocal curling into a slight yelp or yodel or something and the way her vocal actually sighs one moment and then sings like a bird is pretty wondrous as the musical bed actually sways breathes in equally dreamy ways maintaining a great kind of sanguine groove and then not and then again, love the bass shapes too so much.
"Please" is the first glimpse (or maybe my first glimpse) of her sophomore album "Runoff" dropping on March 20th via Figure & Ground.
LINER NOTES (again / bracketed):
[Across the album's eleven tracks, Otracami layers intricate vocals, field recordings, and samples into full-band arrangements that feel overfull with life, mirroring the album's central tension between containment and overflow. "I was trying out leaving for the first time—people and jobs and situations with family," reflects Ortiz. "It was real trial and error—sometimes that really worked and felt liberating and other times I had to turn around and go back. It was a period of big experimentation."]
Cool.
Robb Donker Curtius
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.instagram.com/_otracami_
https://www.tiktok.com/@_otracami_
Otracami is a songwriter and artist based in New York.
Otracami, Brooklyn, singer songwriter Camila Ortiz, bedroom pop, folk indie, indie rock, indie pop, storytelling, acoustic core, somber pop, dreamy, "Please", 2nd album "Runoff", intimate, personal stories,
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