Jess Williamson releases her new record A Mile South Of Heaven next month, and she’s inventing new forms of album promotion. Today, she revealed that she adopted a highway that helped inspire the LP, and she’s declaring it “the unofficial Mile South of Heaven.”
“Something I’ve been working on for a while: I adopted a highway this week!” the Texas-born singer-songwriter wrote on Instagram. She continued:
Two miles outside of Marfa, heading south on 2810, you’ll encounter a two-mile stretch that I hereby declare the unofficial Mile South of Heaven (it’s two miles, but you get the idea).
Many thanks to the kind people at the City of Marfa for working with me on this. It was very important to me to adopt this specific stretch because it’s an area very near and dear to my heart.
All throughout the process of making A Mile South Of Heaven, it became a bit of a ritual for me to drive out of town, go over this hill, park in the first turnout, and walk down the road listening to demos, then rough mixes, then final mixes, all the way through to the final mastered album. It is my way of test-driving the new material. And sometimes I’d just drive, maybe ten or fifteen miles down this road or further, watching as the landscape keeps unfolding and revealing itself over each new hill. It feels like being inside of a painting. I highly recommend listening to music this way.
Here are the coordinates for your GPS: 30.289778, -104.051500
I’ll be out there, picking up trash
So far Williamson has shared the singles “Goodbye To All That,” “Tracking The Tropics,” and “High Heels And Blue Jeans.”
A Mile South Of Heaven is out 10/9 via New West.
