Acclaimed folk-pop songwriter, singer and producer Jeni Schapire returns today with her stunning new release ‘The Bench’.
Exquisite lo-fi beats and hazy atmospherics set the tone for this sobering track, which details a trauma through the beauty of art.
“It has been five years since I was sexually assaulted, yet until I wrote this song, I didn’t know how to write about it. I didn’t even know how to talk about it. The room has a way of getting awfully quiet once you bring something like that up. And victimhood was just suddenly thrust upon me, which felt uncomfortable and burdensome. I wanted to go back to being the person I was before but I couldn’t. I kept having these flashes of memories surrounding it, so I decided that was all I needed to put down on paper. I wish I could say it was like a release, but it wasn’t. What happened, how it happened, I had recounted so many times. Still I felt like my own memory betrayed me. I had overreacted, I was to blame. I was ashamed. This song is a foggy memory. Nothing explicit, just an impression. I hope that people can just listen to it and enjoy it because, ultimately, it’s about the worst imaginable thing happening and coming out the other side alive. Not okay, but okay.”