Beth Ditto and Earl St. Clair join Jacknife Lee on new single "I'm Getting Tired"

"I'm So Tired" is the second single to be shared from The Jacknife Lee album, after February's lead single "Made It Weird" featuring Open Mike Eagle.

He says of his latest outing, "I’d become obsessed with "Attica Blues" by Archie Shepp from 1972. The intensity is relentless. It’s for the head, heart and feet. It has dissent imbedded in its DNA. I wanted to reach even a little bit of that when I started this track. Earl St Clair has an incredible voice and came over to the studio to hang out. We ate, listened to some records including Attica Blues and then I played a beat I had. He wrote some words, sang and yelled on it and it became "I’m Getting Tired". He captured the frustration and exasperation we were feeling with what was happening in the States."

Jacknife Lee adds, "I’d been working with Beth Ditto for a while. She has one of the most soulful voices of our time. I’m a crazy fan of her voice… all punk gospel wildness. I didn’t want to ask anyone that I was producing to be on the record because I didn’t want to blur any lines and my original idea was to work with people I didn’t know and then I thought she would turn this into something really, really special. And she did."

On the track itself, he explains, "I like repetition. Things don’t change much in the track but just works for me. Now we’re in lockdown the lyric has another connotation for me which we explored with the video. I watch news on my phone and get saturated with it. How did these numbskulls get to stand at the podiums? When we wrote the song we were frustrated at these dolts in their ascendancies now here they are. When it gets too much for me, I end up watching people doing dumb shit on Instagram as a counterweight, oscillating between the two. That’s my screen time. That’s the video. Catastrophe and cats."

The Jacknife Lee will be Lee's first album since his 2007 self-titled album, and features collaborations with Sneaks and Haviah Mighty, Genesis Owusu, Aloe Blacc, and more.