Musings on Shmaltz

"When in doubt, just make up rhymes about love". When one of my favorite and most frequent musical collaborators text me those words, my first thought was, "Damn Heather, what's wrong with your cold dead heart, that you've never thought of that once!" The truth is PDA has always given me "the ick", and as a woman creating music in a very male-dominated genre, I have always been reticent to delve into subject matter that one expects of a "girl songwriter".

But having spent an entire album raging against society's complete lack of desire and/or emotional inability to acknowledge and address the dire nature of an unchecked pandemic and runaway climate chaos, it felt like the right time to shake things up thematically. In the end, people are gonna people. As unfortunate as it is, it seems a certain degree of self destruction is wired into our collective being. Societies rise and fall. We keep having to learn the same damn lessons over and over again.

I want to believe that if there is a point to being a sentient creature with a finite lifespan on a spinning rock in a vast expanding universe, the point is to love. The point is to be curious, to create and perhaps leave this Earth having touched the hearts of others in ways big or small. So in that spirit, we're leaning into the mushy stuff and giving you "Shmaltz". An exploration of all kinds of love: true love, maternal love, ill-fated love, the whole kitten caboodle of amor. A leopard can't truly change her spots, so there's still a sizable dollop of angst in there too, but we truly hope you enjoy Dusty Lucite's 5th album "Shmaltz".

Thanks for listening,

H.L. Stratton-Kuhta