Kevin Devine is streaming the first single from Instigator, “No History.” The single revisits the pivotal morning of 9/11/2001, and it views the tragedy from a much more personal point-of-view. Devine writes of the track:
I wrote “No History” last summer, after driving Manhattan’s West Side Highway home to Brooklyn from an early morning doctor’s appointment. It was 8am, and a lot had already happened that day, and the immediate sky was uninterrupted blue, and my mind was lazy, and I happened to look up at my left at the Freedom Tower, and I realized That Day in 2001 was a lot like this one. Memories and images tumbled and fought for space until the song had its shape. I’m 36 and a lifelong New Yorker and in many ways my life is pre/post That Day. That’s also true on a larger scale; a lot of present-day ugliness & scariness (not to mention the poisonous fruit we’re being served in place of sane civic discourse) has its roots in how Power reacted to what happened. This is a song tying moments together to shrink back to the personal, to reconnect to that meaning & narrative, to the kernel of humanity buried in the fog.
Instigator is out 10/21.