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First Watch: Simone White & Renier Zonneveld, 'Interference'

L.A. singer-songwriter Simone White has always been drawn to darkness. Over the course of four moody albums, she's spun arresting narratives with dreamlike images that capture everything from common heartache to the loss of friends and the End Times.

For her latest trip through the surreal, White joins Dutch composer, pianist and DJ Reiner Zonneveld. The song, "Interference," was inspired in part by droughts in White's home state of California and, as she tells NPR Music in an email, by "feeling like there are too many people on the planet and I'm one of them."

"And you know you're not the only one who must be fed," White sings over a spare, haunting piano. "The ever-spinning knot of need / We who cry and infinitely bleed / One and one and one / To take our place when done." So basically, humans are expendable and infinitely replaceable.

The video for "Interference," from cinematographer Michael Pessah, draws heavily on the strange and unsettling imagery of David Lynch and other surrealists. "I wanted the video to be like a haunting dream," White writes. "Not a literal depiction of the song. It's about killing the False Self, in the spiritual sense."

This isn't the first time White has found inspiration in environmental unrest. In 2012, she released "In The Water Where The City Ends," a stirring song and animated video recalling the tsunami that had devastated Japan's Tohoku region the year before.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Robin Hilton is a producer and co-host of the popular NPR Music show All Songs Considered.