Pierre Welsh & the Oaks are back with a poetic contribution to their body of work with the new single "Damned & Adored," a track from the just-released album "God Love Art & Desire." The latest single is a song about the magnetic, rollercoaster lives of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It is less a love song than a plaintive meditation on a struggle, a gaze through the microscope into the soul of creation and the weight of the artist who bears it.
"Damned & Adored" swings between reverence and rebellion. Its production is lush and intimate but also intimate and willfully restrained at the expense of a sudden, loud flash of sound. It whispers more than it shouts, a suitably internal monologue for a song about the quiet doubting at the heart of its creator that he can still be heard and read, even when his life splinters in such a scandal or mystery-riddled way.
Welsh offers no easy answers. Instead, he creates an uncovering narrative that challenges you to dwell on the tension. The man in the story is a hybrid myth and martyr who vanished, disputed, lionized, or loathed. But across the female voice is a quiet form of defiance, a refusal to confine him to the headlines or the speculation. He defends what's left, and his art insists that there's something truer.
It's this duality, "Damned & Adored," that makes the song take shape emotionally and gives it weight. Words like "sexual flowers," are the tip of the cap to Mapplethorpe's controversial flower photography, and they serve as an inescapable reminder of the connection of beauty to provocation, sex to sanctity. The song exploits that conflict shamelessly, never blinking its eye.
Pierre Welsh & the Oaks are good at straddling the line between understated storytelling and emotional honesty, and "Damned & Adored" is no different. The arrangement is skeletal but stirring, minimal, and stretching, giving the song's themes some truth, fidelity, judgment, and redemption. In the end, Welsh reminds us that art lives outside the artist. Art sings in God, and maybe that's where our judgment should also be. With "Damned & Adored," Pierre Welsh and the Oaks have penned a song.