Cosmic Wink

First pressing limited run of 2,000, 140 gram black vinyl \n LP jacket is a 20pt paper with matte finish Printed insert with lyrics and original artwork \n Artwork lovingly and collaboratively designed by Jess Williamson and Mexican Summer Cosmic Wink by Jess Williamson “Cosmic Wink is about Love. That’s Love-with-a-capital-L, true deep love. Ancient love. Across many lifetimes kind of love. It’s about grief, loss, and guilt too. The anguish that comes from having to choose just one path. It’s about the dark side of love: jealousy, and letting people down. It’s about mortality, and how the time we have with the ones we love becomes so much more precious when we realize that we have a finite amount of breaths in these bodies we walk around in. So here’s to Love, Time with her double-edged sword, and the cosmic winks that help us along the way.” – Jess Like the “White Bird” on her new album Cosmic Wink, Jess Williamson is also avian, though of a different feather. While the bird in Williamson’s lyrics sits caged with clipped wings, the artist is a reborn phoenix from a nest in the west.Native State, her debut album, with its taut, spindly tales, felt like Williamson was singing from a roadside motel at 3 am on an empty desert highway. It was a reflective place in the mind of a Texan who spent time living in New York City; the songs were developed and mature, emotionally steeped to a darkened brew from a profound experience elsewhere. Williamson’s sophomore album Heart Song marked a dramatic departure from Native State, bristling beyond the confines of folk to question the comforts of home.On Cosmic Wink, her third album and first for Mexican Summer, Williamson emerges with another self part of an even wider consciousness. A self that bears wise evidence of past lives, but also feels new and unfamiliar, if at times from a different artist entirely. A reference to the Jungian idea of synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences,” Cosmic Wink is as much a reflection on inspired companionship as it is a rebirth. She fell deeply in love, and then her life was uprooted; Williamson left Texas for California, leaving behind the roadworn verses of her previous albums for brighter, bolder songwriting. It was this love and new location that inspired Cosmic Wink.Both musically and lyrically, the exploding postmodern spirit of California - and Los Angeles in particular - is infused in the DNA of Cosmic Wink. The Byrds-ian jangle of album opener “I See The White” airbrushes halos around the brain with an immortal pop hook. Williamson’s contralto sheds the delicate vulnerability of Heart Song for an assuredness, intoxicating in its deep sermon. When Williamson asks her listener to “tell me everything you know about consciousness,” it’s an invitation down a two lane blacktop, both vessels heading the same direction.The brightest moment of Cosmic Wink arrives on the broken wings of “White Bird,” Williamson’s dualistic testament of curiosity for an unknown coast wi