With brand new single “Explode,” Saint Tone delivers a ballad that digs deep into the emotional trenches, conveying a message of healing and release.
Saint Tone is known for his positive and uplifting songs, but the Sarasota based artist slows things down on this more introspective track. The emotional impact is just as hard hitting.
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Built around warm acoustic guitar, gentle piano and subtle atmospheric textures, “Explode” draws listeners into an intimate space of vulnerability. The lyrics are raw and reflective, with lines like “I am here to expose all the bitterness that soils my soul”, striking a chord for anyone burdened by the trials of life and any unresolved pain.
As the song unfolds, it becomes clear that this isn’t just about sadness. It is more about transformation. Saint Tone invites us to confront the darkest corners of ourselves, not to dwell there, but to finally let go.
The repetition of the chorus – “If I don’t let it go, I will explode” – is both a warning and a revelation. The result is a song that is much like a musical exhale, making way for light again after a rough period.
For fans of Sting, Damien Rice or Ben Harper’s more meditative work, “Explode” will feel like home.
It’s a powerful reminder that sometimes the most important journey is an inward one, and one where healing begins with honesty.
About Saint Tone
With over 7,000 performances to his name, Saint Tone delivers an uplifting fusion of pop, rock and country styles. He combines catchy hooks with spiritual affirmations and thought provoking lyrics.
Based in Sarasota, Florida, Tony Saint Tone writes music that is centered on themes of self empowerment, motivation and connectionl. His storytelling and high vibe energy together with empowering messages create a musical exoerience that is both fun and deeply meaningful.
Perfect for anthem seekers, dancers and old souls alike, Saint Tone’s music will make your feet move while also feeding your soul.
When a life altering moment changes everything, some artists retreat. Others write. For Molly Thomas, the aftermath of a devastating car accident in August 2023 became both a period of deep healing and unexpected creative clarity.
Her new single “Crash,” co-written with longtime collaborator Ken Rose, captures that raw emotional journey with rare honesty and grace.
Quiet, luminous, and haunting in its simplicity, “Crash” tells the story of survival, acceptance and the deep gratitude that follows being kept on this earth by the kindness of others.
In this interview, Ken Rose opens up about the inspiration behind the song, the process of writing and recording it, and the symbolism behind the intimate video that accompanies its release.
1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
Crash was the only song we wrote after Molly’s accident. We were sitting on Captain Tom’s dock, in the hammocks. Molly was still in recovery, and the song just flowed naturally.
It’s always been a favorite because of its honesty, and I love the free, easy ’70s vibe we captured. “Crash” is essentially a documentary that encapsulates Molly’s accident — not just the physical experience, but the emotional and spiritual journey as well.
It’s also a reflection of the deep gratitude we feel for the community and circle of friends who showed up when Molly needed support the most. I asked Molly to record a simple, neutral, and unaffected vocal video on the porch because I wanted to capture her emotional strength. It was a gamble — it was either going to work or completely fall flat.
Since Molly and I were writing and recording the album before, during, and after the crash, I witnessed her pain, joy, and growth firsthand. I wanted to capture her “survival” in the video — and I think we did.
2. What was the inspiration behind this new video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
The inspiration for the video was to capture the essence of “pure” Molly, combined with the feeling of movement — driving — to represent her journey and recovery. The clarity of Molly’s emotions, contrasted with a blurry, surreal night drive through a foreign country (I filmed it in Casablanca, Morocco), felt like the right metaphor.
3. What was the process of making the video?
The process of making the video was simple: don’t overthink anything.
We had just half a day to create something, so it had to be all about trust and flow. That’s how our creative partnership has always worked — trusting that whatever we make together will be honest.
An emotional folk-pop reflection on the moment your life begins to shift.
Havilah Tower’s latest single Open Wide captures something elusive. That subtle turning point when you realize the life you’ve built no longer fits the shape of your heart.
Wrapped in a warm folk pop instrumentation, “Open Wide” is something of a softly unfolding meditation on self-honesty, transformation and the beauty of rediscovering what truly matters.
Built around a graceful acoustic guitar line and anchored by Havilah’s soulful and expressive vocals, the song opens like a journal entry. It’s private, deliberate and fully human. As she sings of a dream life slipping from her grasp, the listener is drawn into that universal threshold where illusion gives way to truth, not with drama, but with clarity. This is the sound of someone who is choosing alignment over image and heart over habit.
What takes “Open Wide” to the next level though is its arrangement – the cello swells, the ambient textures and the thoughtful percussion surrounds the lyrics without ever overwhelming them. Each instrumental choice seems to lean into the song’s emotional arc, and echoes the idea that shedding old narratives can work to make space for something more honest and grounded.
Lyrically, Havilah strikes a balance between a sense of vulnerability and control. Lines like “the dream that I had, it’s not what I thought” carry both disappointment and empowerment. There is maturity in her writing, as each verse is anchored in lived experience.
Listeners who are familiar with artist like Patty Griffin, Brandi Carlile or even the more introspective moments of Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” will feel at home here. But “Open Wide” is not derivative – it is distinctly Havilah.
What makes the track even more especially resonant is how it reframes letting go not as failure, but as a grace.
It’s a song for anyone who has ever paused in the middle of their own story and asked: “Is this still true for me?”
In that way, “Open Wide” becomes more than a single, but also an invitation. One that asks you to step into your life with your own eyes – and heart – fully open.
There’s a fire in “Second Chance” that doesn’t flicker. It surges.
German hard rock band Stigma, forged in 2021, have made good on the promise of their earlier EPs (Last Order, First Call) and delivered something tougher, deeper and far more personal. This is a record born from global, political and internal unrest, and every note very much feels like a response to it.
Recorded high in the Italian mountains and carved out of both philosophical musings and lived in experiences, “Second Chance” truly stands out.
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Stigma don’t look for the easy answers here. Instead, it’s more about owning the chaos, surviving the night, and daring to keep going. From the opening track “The Signs”, frontman Gerald Zinnegger sets the tone. It’s searching, defiant and anthemic.
“Spinning circles in space and time” he sings, with conviction. That duality of doubt and defiance ripples through the whole of the album. “Glorious Victory” follows with a cinematic sweep. Guitars soar, drums pound and the message lands with a force – that true strength lies in control.
If “Second Chance” has a heartbeat, it is “Blaze of My Heart” where Zinnegger is at full throttle, singing like a man with nothing left to lose. It’s a cathartic outburst and a reminder of why any of us hold on through the noise. The bands sounds really locked in here.
Their lead single, “Faraway” is a rare and tender moment. This song is restrained, melancholic and shot through with longing. Inspired by the prison island Gorgona, it is a study in emotional isolation. Yet even here, Stigma show a flicker of hope, of imagined forgiveness.
Then comes “Monster,” arugably the album’s most vulnerable moment. The lyrics here flirt with self loathing but stop short of collapse. The closer “Corruptor” slinks in with a poisonous groove – hypnotic, lean and devestatingly timely. It’s a warning more than protest that corruption is not always loud. Sometimes, it whispers. And, sometimes, it is you.
Overall sound wise, the album strikes a powerful balance. Guitarist Markus Mantau, bassist René Chlebnitschek and drummer Bernd Paptistella lay down a muscular, dynamic foundation throughout. The production captures the sweat and shadows of a real band in a real room.
Crucially, “Second Chance” is an album that connects everything together. It is an album that reminds the listener that rock doesn’t have to posture to hit hard. That heaviness can come from honesty, not just distortion. That a band still finding its shape can already sound this defined.
If “First Call” introduced Stigma, “Second Chance” certainly cements them as not just a band to watch but a band that sees the world clearly and sings about it honestly.
On their debut single, Philadelphia duo Gun-Shy Butterfly – the collaborative force of Julie Exter and Andrea Tarka White – make an unforgettable entrance.
With “Dark Side,” they summon the ghosts of ‘90s alt-rock and grunge not as a nostalgia act, but as a vehicle for urgent and lived truth. It’s gritty, melodic and emotionally unfiltered – a track for anyone who has been dismissed, diminished or erased and decided, finally, to stop apologizing.
Listen here:
From the opening bars, “Dark Side” makes its mission clear. A thick wall of fuzzed out guitar crashes forward, underscored by relentless pounding rhythms. Exter and White keep the structure lean, the parts tight, but the sound feels much bigger. Their vocals cut through the distortion with sharp, melodic urgency, the kind that makes you sit up and pay attention. Harmonies buzz, crackle and scorch and linger like smoke in the wake of a personal firestorm.
But what elevates “Dark Side” beyond a well-executed homage to Veruca Salt, The Breeders, or early Hole is the emotional precision. There is no coyness or artifice. Just clarity. And rage. And the slow burning strength that emerges when you finally accept that sometimes the only way forward is straight through your own wreckage.
At the heart of “Dark Side” is a searing narrative of loss and self-assertion. Andrea Tarka White, who penned the lyrics, pulls no punches in describing the song’s origin. It was a time when she lost everything – friends, community, her social identity – all in the fallout of a betrayal that left her isolated and angry. But rather than shrink from that anger, she leaned into it. She chose the more honest choice:
“Dark Side is about a moment in time when I lost absolutely everything: my friends, my social life, and my sense of self. People had to choose between me and a lying, cheating man, and they chose him. I was so angry, not just that I lost everything, but that he somehow didn’t.
At that moment realizing how bifurcated everything felt, him or me, right or wrong, dark or light, it changed something in me. I realized that love isn’t about being positive all the time. Or being nice. It’s about embracing all of who I am and moving forward. Which sometimes means standing up for myself and leaving people behind.”
In that spirit, “Dark Side” becomes more than a breakup song. It’s kind of like a cultural exorcism. It speaks to a wider exhaustion shared by many women (and others) who’ve been told, explicitly or otherwise, that survival must come with a smile, that pain should be polite, and that rage is somehow unseemly.
Gun-Shy Butterfly torpedoes that notion. Here, darkness is not weakness – it is armor. It’s clarity. It’s the fuel for transformation.
The title alone is a challenge to binary thinking- good/bad, victim/villain, light/dark. A butterfly that flinches but never stops moving. That duality threads through the song’s DNA and defines the band’s ethos.
And the DIY ethic behind the track only deepens its impact. Much of “Dark Side” was recorded in Exter’s basement, where raw takes became the backbone of the song’s visceral sound. Guitar tones were captured on the first try. An impressive feat that speaks to both musicians’ instinctive command of their instruments and their refusal to over-process the realness out of their work. Final vocal tracking was completed at The Daisy Corner and The Gradwell House, with mixing by Dave Downham and mastering by Kim Rosen (Knack Mastering) providing a final sheen that never sacrifices grit.
Gun-Shy Butterfly also offers something refreshingly rare in the current music landscape: a voice of women in midlife who are still making, growing and loudly refusing to disappear. Both Exter and White are mothers in their 40’s, navigating parenthood, work and creative life in tandem.
“Dark Side” is a song for anyone who has been gaslit into silence. For anyone who has walked away from everything they knew in order to reclaim who they are. For anyone who has learned, sometimes too late, that self-respect isn’t always gentle. And that’s okay!
Keep up with everything Gun-Shy Butterfly on the Website
Sometimes, the most resonant songs emerge not from a single moment of inspiration but from a long, quiet process of rediscovery.
“Open Wide” is the latest single from cinematic folk-pop artist Havilah Tower, and it is one such song – a reflective and emotionally charged meditation on what it means to outgrow the life you thought you wanted. Tower explores the quiet reckoning that comes when ambition gives way to presence, and when clarity begins to form in the spaces we often overlook.
The journey to Open Wide began with an unexpected spark: an article about her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, hiring their first Songwriter-in-Residence.
That artist, Darden Smith, would go on to mentor Tower through a series of creative breakthroughs, helping her reconnect with her voice in new ways. What followed was a groundbreaking collaboration across borders – Tower and her longtime trio partnered with international music startup Hall Up to bring the track to life, working with UK-based producer David A. Griffiths and Hollywood engineer Adam Freeman to shape the sound.
“Open Wide” marks a shift not just in Tower’s sound, but in her storytelling. It’s the product of reflection, resilience and a willingness to see – and sing – the truth.
1.Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
Our newest single, Open Wide, is a cinematic folk-pop song that explores what happens when you’ve built up a “dream life” but it turns out to be different than you thought or want anymore.
Open Wide is a raw, lyrical reflection on trading illusion for truth—and finding the courage to be honest with yourself on what really matters to you, which often are the simple things around you all along.
2. What was the inspiration behind this new video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
For the Open Wide music video, we wanted to bring the core message of the song, showing the contrast of someone leading a seemingly successful life on the surface while also struggling.
In the music video for “Open Wide”, you follow a central character as she rises to fame through her music, a life she worked hard to create. Even though it all looks beautiful on the outside, she is struggling on the inside missing the core, fundamental things in her life she grew up like spending time with family, true connections with friends and a sense of herself.
Central to where we meet the main character in the story is an unraveling of this supposed “dream life”. It’s through this unraveling that she breaks through to something more meaningful, her own truth and direction – all things that take courage to embrace when you’re leading such a seemingly successful life. This shift plays out in the music video as a parallel between her adult self and her childhood memories that she starts to reconnect with.
It’s a reminder that all the glitters is not gold, and that sometimes our hardest moments can be doorways into something more truer and more meaningful. Hence the lyrics: “Unraveling minds open wide”.
3. What was the process of making the video?
In making Open Wide, we wanted to push the envelope of leveraging technology to tell the story. We tend to embrace a “test and learn” mentality so we decided to leverage some of the latest AI tools, like Runway, and build out the narrative portion of the story, which involved a lot of hours of fine-tuning prompts and then of course, editing the clips to tell the story. Through this work, we built out the journey of our central character.
Simultaneously, we wanted to ground the video in this world with a performance from our band so we conducted multiple filmings in order to capture each of us to interweave throughout the video, mainly featuring Havilah Tower as the primary narrator who is singing Open Wide.
There is a subtle moment that happens at the beginning and end of the music video, starting off with what appears to be a forced smile but ending with a more real, authentic smile. The smile bookends the journey of going from a seemingly successful life to truer success of being connected to yourself and making choices that are actually fulfilling.
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