On his upcoming album, Patrick Maguire, aka Straight White Teeth pays tribute to his home town of Costilla, New Mexico. To do this, Patrick stripped away all the excess, as he explains, “I stepped away from my computer and MIDI keyboard and wrote almost exclusively with my acoustic guitar”. Comparing it to his previous albums that were clinical dissections of modern technology, Patrick suggests, “Costilla feels and sounds like it lives in a different universe”. With Costilla in the pipeline, today Patrick is sharing the latest taster from it, Flowering, a track he originally wrote back in 2017 while recovering from a serious bike accident.

The opening track on Costilla, Flowering serves as an introduction to the intimacy the listener is about to experience. The track begins with the creak of a door, footsteps and the buzzing of nature, before the acoustic guitar enters, with its propulsive, repeated pattern that runs almost throughout the track. The real scene-stealer though is Patrick’s vocal; warm and gentle, it is double-tracked throughout, adding a certain natural sounding echo, reminiscent of Angelo De Augustine or early Villagers.

Lyrically the track seems to contrast perception and reality, asking if how we present ourselves to the world is close to the truth we hold inside, “I can’t believe the times, you can die but still survive, on a screen and on a line, you’ll be flowering”. He seems to offer little in way of opinion, more an observation of the times, left for the listener to draw their own conclusion. This feels like a new phase for Straight White Teeth, a new approach that’s paying dividends; like the song title, this is a musician on the verge of coming into full bloom.

Costilla is out May 18th via Hunny Hawk Records. For more information on Straight White Teeth visit https://www.straightwhiteteethmusic.com/.