Becca Mancari has shared a new single, ‘Homesick Honeybee’, taken from their third album Left Hand. It follows previous offerings ‘Don’t Even Worry’ (with Brittany Howard) and ‘Over and Over’ (featuring Julien Baker). Check it out below.
In a statement about the track, Mancari explained:
Homesick Honeybee” came from a technique I practised during the making of ‘Left Hand’: Whenever I felt stuck in my writing process, I would pull out my 1980s Webster dictionary and scan through sections at a time. One day, I landed on the H’s, and both “homesick” and “honeybee” were words that lingered with me. I wondered; Could a bee actually be homesick? So, I did some reading and learned how a bee cannot survive for very long when it’s separated from its hive. Even if it finds another hive, the bees will not accept them into their colony because they smell different than the rest of them.
In some ways, this song is about my own homesickness; trying to find a place to call my home. The beginning of the song starts with a voicemail from my 93-year-old grandpa who was the first elder in my family to accept me unconditionally as a queer person. One time when he was visiting my parents, he quite literally asked me to “sneak” him out of their house in order to finally meet my partner of many years. In his words, “God is love and there is nothing that could separate him from me.” I think for years I starved my heart from love, for fear of being hurt again and again. But with one perfect act of love from my grandfather I learned how to build a home of my own, and to trust and love myself enough to let my broken heart finally start to mend.
Left Hand arrives August 25 via Captured Tracks.
