Gina Birch shares new album title-track "I Play My Bass Loud"

"I Play My Bass Loud" is the second outing from Birch's debut solo album, following November's lead single "Wish I Was You" featuring Thurston Moore, and is teamed with a Vice Cooler-directed video that stars bass players including Emily Elhaj (Angel Olsen), Hazel Rigby (TBHQ), Mikki Itzigsohn (Small Wigs) and Staz Lindes (The Paranoyds).

"Vice asked his long-term friend writer, dancer and choreographer, Oakland based, Brontez Purnell to be the central character of the video," Birch explains. "There are five women bass players performing in the video, Emily Elhaj (Angel Olsen), Hazel Rigby (TBHQ), Mikki Itzigsohn (Small Wigs), Staz Lindes (The Paranoyds) and myself. We shot the video in L.A. so the bass players in the video are not primarily the ones on the track apart from Emily Elhaj who plays bass with Angel Olson and Gina B. The song is a celebration of bass guitar as a voice, simple or layered, pounding or dancing or everything at once. A celebration of a shout, a yell from the window, and the I am Here, of a woman's creativity on the bass guitar. I play my bass, my bass my bass my bass, I play my bass loud."

Birch says of the title of her solo album I Play My Bass Loud, "I always thought: if I open my big bay window upstairs and play my bass, I’m not some groovy young rapper. I’m this old white woman playing my bass guitar out of my window. I just want to stick my head out and yell down the street: HELL, I’M HERE, AND I’M PLAYING MY BASS LOUD!"

In November last year Sharon Van Etten and Birch announced Illustrated Lyrics, a book of Van Etten's lyrics that features illustrations by Birch.