Premiere: Gold Light + Snakemusk's Forlorn "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"

Gold Light + Snakemusk’s forlorn “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” resonates with heartache and longing in its visceral portrayal of unrequited love.

“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” – Gold Light

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Attraction is anything but convenient: It can strike us at the most inopportune times, and doesn’t care for things like convenience or compatibility. We too easily (and too often) fall for the wrong people, finding ourselves hurt by a process we have little to not control over. Gold Light + Snakemusk’s forlorn “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” resonates with heartache and longing in its visceral portrayal of unrequited love.

Gold Light art — The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter – Gold Light

Shoulder up your gun
whistle up your hounds
Early bird might get the worm
but the field’s a battleground
You’ll always have a puncher’s chance
if you can stand another round
But it’s gonna take a posse
if you wanna drag me down

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” the lead single off Gold Light + Snakemusk’s forthcoming album Shadows in the Shallows (released May 10, 2019 via Bailey Park). An Asheville, NC duo of Joe Chang (Gold Light) and Beau Campolong (Snakemusk), Gold Light + Snakemusk combine the forlorn ache of broken hearts with a dark depth of life experience in their duet.

Gold Light (Joe Chang) describes “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” as “the ongoing, neverending, moving-in-circles chase that happens when one person pines for another, but that other person has their eyes set on another, and so on and so forth, to where no one ever really gets what or who they want. Or essentially, one person chasing after another, but they ain’t ever gonna catch them.”

With Snakemusk on vocals, the song begins with Dylanesque guitars and a somber harmonica riff. Snakemusk’s lyrics evoke the heavy weight of longing:

Cus the heart is a lonely hunter it seems
But your heart will miss its
mark if it comes after me
Like a dog gone and barked up the wrong tree
Cus the heart’s gonna go wherever it please

“I think this song sums up the album pretty well, in at least for the cause of most of it, as I personally went through a breakup that caused most of the songs here,” Gold Light tells Atwood Magazine. “And the truth was that it wasn’t a bad breakup, nothing terrible happened, all it was was that someone wanted to be with someone else, which was something I’d never really experienced before in a breakup, at least in one where everything was going good. So it caused a different sort of hurt. One of feeling not worthy or good enough, and another of missing out on what might have blossomed into something, but now we’ll never know.”

With a distinctly American folk ambience, Gold Light + Snakemusk evoke heartland warmth and pain in a hushed, emotive performance that says all it needs to say without a gust of electricity or noticeable crescendo. Stream “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” exclusively on Atwood Magazine!

“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” – Gold Light

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