Singer-songwriter Francesca Blanchard recently released a new video for her song “Free.” Prior to its release, the song itself was featured on ABC’s long-running medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“I was performing a lot over the last two years,” Blanchard tells Seven Days in a recent phone interview. The bilingual artist dropped her first full-length album, deux visions, in 2015. “I was kind of burning out a little bit,” she continues. “I needed to get out of Burlington. I needed to breathe, and [to] leave this beautiful state for a second.”
After mountain climbing with Outward Bound on the West Coast and volunteering as a music and theater teacher in Ecuador, she returned to the Queen City this summer with intention to reevaluate the trajectory of her next album cycle. “Free,” along with “My Heart,” a track released earlier this year, are a pair of older songs Blanchard decided to unleash in the meantime. They may or may not appear on her forthcoming album.
“[‘Free’] was written out of a need — it sounds cliché — to be free [from] my insecure thoughts of what my music is, others’ opinions [and] what will the future hold,” Blanchard explains.
In the video, director Kayhl Cooper of Noise Ordinance plays with this concept — the hunger for sovereignty — by juxtaposing open spaces with confined ones. We see Blanchard basking in a sunny meadow, but she also sits in a parked car and in an attic with a low ceiling. At one point, she’s literally backed into a corner. But the overwhelming sentiment is positive and uplifting, never dwelling on a sense of entrapment for too long.
As for the new album, Blanchard says it is “still in the works.”
“There is a bigger body of work coming,” she explains. “I just don’t have any details, unfortunately.”
In the meantime, watch the clip from “Grey’s Anatomy” below — but beware! It may contain spoilers.
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