VIDEO: Naomi Alligator Shares Video for New Single 'Blue for You'

Naomi Alligator, the project of Los Angeles-based songwriter and multi-media artist Corrinne James, shares a self-directed video featuring original animations for her new single "Blue For You," the latest from her recently announced new album, Double Knot, out July 1st on Carpark Records.

"Blue For You is a song about obsessing over a bad relationship. It's also about navigating confusing friendships that sometimes lean into romantic relationships," says James. "The video focuses on a girl who is in love with her sty boyfriend. He's the worst but she doesn't wanna believe that she's stuck in a relationship with someone who doesn't actually love/like her."

Naomi Alligator's home-spun recordings serve as a platform for James' lyrical narratives. Both mournful and aspirant, this collection of songs wrestles with monolithic themes such as loneliness and yearning with an uncommon earnestness.

Naomi Alligator is fed up. She's sick of trying to make relationships work that have already run their course, and tired of sitting in a wintry apartment waiting for her life to kick into gear. On her forthcoming album Double Knot via Carpark Records, the modern folk singer/songwriter from Virginia attempts to unwind her life from all that is holding her back. In a way, it's a coming-of-age record about shedding what no longer serves you and, ultimately, finding something like deliverance.

Naomi Alligator began writing Double Knot while living in Philadelphia during the height of the pandemic and the deterioration of a longterm romance.When asked though, Naomi rejects the notion that Double Knot is a breakup album, or autobiographical at all. Moreso, she says, it's a personal reckoning in which, "the minute before you make a big decision, you tally up the reasons why you don't want to do what you're doing anymore."

That desire to turn the page expands to the production of the album as well. Naomi Alligator generally houses her narratives in beds of minimal, home-tracked instrumentation-influenced by the stripped-down poeticism of Joan Baez and Liz Phair's Girly-Sound tapes. Double Knot finds Naomi continuing to hone the winning combination of guitar and banjo she established on 2021's Concession Stand Girl EP.

For Double Knot though, Naomi wanted a fuller, more dynamic sound: more instruments, more harmonies, more layering, more, more, more. Inspired by the impressionistic melodies of Animal Collective and MGMT, Naomi peppers in computer-generated synths throughout the album, most notably on the song "Burn Out." These electronic flourishes augment the more grounding string instruments, arriving somewhere more ethereal than Naomi's earlier work while still maintaining her warm songwriting.

If anything, Double Knot is a reminder that you can always pack up your bags, try something new, and change your life. As for Naomi Alligator herself? She moved west, to California.

Growing up, Virginia native and multi-media artist Corrinne James remembers floating in the backyard pool under a canopy of trees. Staring at the sunlight peeking out through the leaves, James couldn't help but feel both incredibly safe and viscerally in the world. Her musical project, Naomi Alligator, was born of that same quality.

James is an accomplished visual artist by trade, having produced hand-drawn, animated music videos for artists like Slow Pulp and Emily Yacina. But picking up the guitar and writing songs herself allowed James to channel that wondrous, childlike feeling she experienced belly-up in the pool.

Inspired by Liz Phair's lo-fi and poetic Girly-Sound tapes, James began uploading her own intimate self-recordings on Bandcamp under her secret, amphibious alias. As she was wrapping up her studies at the University of Virginia, people started to notice. In 2018, after a string of online Naomi Alligator releases, James was invited to perform at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar in Charlottesville.

She soon became embedded in the city's DIY scene, playing regularly with a group of local artists who would become the band Orange Folder. The pandemic put the brakes on their live shows, but all the while James continued to evolve her modern, folk arrangements and self-release music as Naomi Alligator. In May 2020, she put out the aptly titled Small World, her first full-length album.

Pining for a new scene in a different city, James moved to Los Angeles during summer 2021. Omnivorous in her desire to stretch her sound, James began incorporating banjo and synths into her work. In October of that same year, Naomi Alligator made her Carpark Records debut with a 4-song EP called Concession Stand Girl.

Watch the new music video here:

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