Drugdealer – “Pictures Of You” (Feat. Kate Bollinger)

Tessa Binder

Drugdealer – “Pictures Of You” (Feat. Kate Bollinger)

Tessa Binder

In a few weeks, the deeply retro-minded project Drugdealer will release the new album Hiding In Plain Sight. We’ve already posted the early tracks “Madison” and “Someone To Love,” and now they’ve also shared a final single called “Pictures Of You.” It’s not a Cure cover. Instead, Drugdealer mastermind Michael Collins — not the guy who Liam Neeson played in that one movie — teamed up with Virginia singer-songwriter Kate Bollinger for a louche, funky, extremely ’70s choogle.

In a press release, Michael Collins says how the collaboration came to be:

I was on the East Coast visiting my parents when my publisher suggested a possible writing session with Kate. I had been itching to ride a freight train since the beginning of the pandemic, so I used the opportunity to do so from Baltimore down to Richmond. When I got there, we became friends really quickly and ended up writing this song at Spacebomb Studios. The whole experience was really spur of the moment and organic.

Meanwhile, Kate Bollinger says:

Michael and I wrote this song last summer on a day when he was stopping through Virginia. I picked him up near the train station, and we went and hung out in a park by my house. We stayed up late drinking with my roommate and went to my friend’s studio the next day to make some music together. I went upstairs and took a nap and in the meantime; while I was sleeping, he had written the music and melody to “Pictures of You.” When I woke up, we wrote the lyrics and finished the song together. I’ve always approached lyrics in isolation, and writing this song showed me a whole other way of making music with someone else. A month after becoming friends with Michael, I visited him in Los Angeles for the first time and decided I wanted to live there, so it feels special having this song come out a month after my move to Los Angeles, a year after we wrote it.

Check out “Pictures Of You” below.

Hiding In Plain Sight is out 10/28 on Mexican Summer.

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