Artist: Melanie MacLaren
Hometown: New York, New York
Song: “Tourist”
Album: Tourist
Release Date: April 20, 2023
In Their Words: “I wrote ‘Tourist’ for my nieces and nephews during a time when we were all grieving an unimaginable loss in our family. Most of the songs I’d written during that period were songs I kept to myself because they just felt bleak and counterproductive, and I thought if I was going to write about this at all (and go so far as to record it), I should write a song that lyrically and musically provides some comfort; otherwise it felt wrong. Overall the song is here to say that most everything is temporary, but that there are some things out there that we don’t understand that are true and eternal.
“The love between a parent and child I think can be one of those things — it stays with you when you leave or when the person that loved you leaves. If it’s true, then it stays. The title is kind of a riff on that, talking about something serious in a really corny way. All the songs on the record deal with similar themes — memory, family, loss — and when I wrote this song I realized that they’re all actually about grief in some way or other, and learning how to come to terms with loss by ascribing value to things that are fleeting. Because all things are, but that doesn’t make them pointless.” — Melanie MacLaren
Photo Credit: Liza Epprecht
