The Beths Release New Single/Video, “Mother, Pray For Me” & Announce Album Release Shows
The Beths —the New Zealand-based quartet of vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck —release “Mother, Pray For Me,” the third single/video from their new album, Straight Line Was A Lie, out August 29th on ANTI-.
Following last month’s single, “No Joy," “a punchy, guitar-forward track about feeling nothing at all,” (Paste) “Mother, Pray For Me” is stripped-down and intensely personal. Over plaintive finger-picked guitar, Stokes’ voice is childlike in its wistful plea for connection. Here, Stokes grapples with the lives her parents have led, their mortality, and how to see them as people who did their best, even when it might not have felt like enough. “I cried the whole time writing it,” Stokes reflects. “It's not really about my mother, it's about me —what I hope our relationship is, what I think it is, what it maybe actually is, and what I can or can't expect out of it.”
Stokes continues, “My mother is a first gen Indonesian immigrant, and very Catholic. I was born in Jakarta and we moved to Auckland when I was four. I think this song is me trying to understand my relationship with my mum, and her relationship to her faith and with her own mother. It was hard to write. We came up with a full band arrangement for the song, but in the end it seemed to feel the clearest with just me and the guitar. And a bit of organ.”
Watch the Video for “Mother, Pray For Me”
The path from The Beths’ critically celebrated and year-end-list-topping 2022 album Expert In A Dying Field to Straight Line Was A Lie was anything but straightforward. For the first time, Stokes was struggling to write new songs beyond fragments she’d recorded on her phone. She’d recently started taking an SSRI, which on one hand made her feel like she could “fix” everything broken in her life, from her mental and physical health to fraught family dynamics. At the same time, writing wasn’t coming as easily as it had before.
With Straight Line Was A Lie, Stokes and Pearce broke down the typical Beths writing process, opening themselves up to a wave of creative input, with Stokes’ free-flowing writing routine proving to be therapeutic. Already a celebrated lyricist, Stokes has long impressed fans and critics with catchy, instant-classic turns of phrase that capture the personal and ladder up to the universal. But Stokes’ intentional deconstruction and rebuilding of her relationship to writing, however, has resulted in a complete renewal. Her songwriting has achieved startling new depths of insight and vulnerability, making Straight Line Was A Lie the most sharply observant, truthful, and poetic Beths project to date.
Earlier this year, The Beths announced a world tour across North America, the UK and Europe this fall. They’ll headline some of their biggest venues to date, including The Wiltern in Los Angeles, The Fillmore in San Francisco, The Salt Shed in Chicago, Brooklyn Paramount in New York City, Union Transfer in Philadelphia, 9:30 Club in Washington, DC and more. A full list of dates is below, and tickets are now available here.