Every week, the Milwaukee Music Premiere sponsored by Density Studios connects the city’s artists with our listening audience. If you’re an artist with a track you’d like us to debut exclusively on Radio Milwaukee, head over to our Music Submission page to learn how.
Change happens in its own time. It can be incremental or thunderously sudden — or, in the case of “Blush On” from voulouse, both.
The project from Milwaukee-raised Jacquelyn Beaupré is new, but Beaupré herself is a familiar name to the city’s music scene through her work with Americana duo Blessed Feathers. The track we’re helping her debut today emerged from the aftermath of that band’s dissolution way back in 2016 but needed time to marinate before she was ready to share it with the world.
In the fall of that year, Beaupré had decamped to the Western U.S. as she processed “the shedding of the old, uncomfortable, vulnerable, unknown, exciting; the feeling that moving on is vulnerability, and that in that I will make mistakes and have to get used to that. I was stumbling into new territories by ripping down all the veils around to see what could possibly have been missing before.”
One of the fruits from that labor is “Blush On,” which she split-wrote in Arizona and California but recorded all the way back in her home state at Honeytone Music Studio in Neenah. Lyrically, it reflects many of the actions and emotions Beaupré experienced a decade ago while navigating the period of upheaval:
It’s so easy
You can watch me
Blushing on and
Going around
Making mistakes
I’ll try harder
But some things can’t wait
Why deny them?
It’s hard to ignore the irony interlaced with those last couple lines, considering the patience Beaupré exercised while finding her way back to music. She noted that it “felt like creating new pathways” and was at times overwhelming before settling into a “collaborative, magical and warm process.”
Those are pretty accurate descriptors for the sonic signature of “Blush On.” It was produced beautifully by Patrick Boland, Marty Brueggemann and Jeff Patlingrao, with the latter two playing on the track as well. Together with Beaupré, they create a sound that makes change feel natural — a guest that drops by unexpectedly but isn’t unwelcome.
A brief acoustic-guitar intro suggests something gentle in store, but that’s set aside as the track begins in earnest. This isn’t a feathery, floating affair. Instead, there’s a kind of insistence that comes across through Beaupré’s vocal syncopation, a punchy piano line and a bridge driven by electric guitar that provides a hint of chaos before things settle down for the final verse.
When you sit on a song for a decade, you run the risk of it becoming irrelevant, either thematically or sonically. For “Blush On,” Beaupré seems to have gotten the timing just right.
You can listen to the new track from Beaupré’s voulouse project using the player at the top of the page or on the 88Nine airwaves throughout today (7:30 and 11:30 a.m.; 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.). For more music from voulouse, including additional singles that sound like they’re on the way later this year, go to the project’s Bandcamp page.
