Angelo De Augustine Shares 'The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill'

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine shares the second single, “The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill,” from his upcoming album Toil and Trouble.

The song is based on the Betty and Barney Hill incident, a famous UFO sighting and alien encounter involving a couple in New Hampshire in 1961. “Ballad” pulls us deeper into Toil and Trouble, De Augustine’s exploration of the counter-world that the fantastical “Another Universe” single introduced us to last month.

Clara Murray’s accompanying video for “The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill” depicts a dreamlike, abstract vision of the couple and their dog in dynamic stop-motion animation. Watch it here.

“While making the album I endured an experience so horrendous, torturous, and inexplicable that words fail me and explanation seems impossible. Within this period, I felt a close connection to Betty and Barney Hill and their story. I even started to believe that perhaps I had been abducted by some kind intergalactic being as they claimed occurred to them fifty-four years ago.

When we experience something that doesn't make logical sense, the mind looks to conjure any explanation no matter how outlandish it appears. We appear to crave understanding. Perhaps it makes us feel safe. The looming presence of the unknown is daunting and sometimes frightening. However, there is much we do not yet understand, some of which we will never comprehend.” - Angelo De Augustine

“As with any alien abduction story, the case of Betty and Barney Hill left me unsettled, curious, doubtful. I wanted to capture that faltering feeling through repetitive, abstract events—as if the car is moving through time and space until time and space itself degrades around them—the characters, stuck in a loop, ultimately ending up in the same place they began. The setting is eerie, shifting, dreamlike and yet the invasion is corporeal—a haunting within flesh—as described by Barney Hill, ‘Oh those eyes. They're there in my brain.’” - Clara Murray

De Augustine’s first solo effort since 2019’s breakthrough third album, the Thomas Bartlett-produced Tomb, and follow-up to 2021’s critically acclaimed collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, A Beginner’s Mind, Toil and Trouble sees the Southern California artist returning to the self-contained approach of his 2015 debut Spirals of Silence and 2017’s Swim Inside the Moon.

De Augustine spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination, creating an all-enveloping work that exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. He wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed Toil and Trouble on his own, shaping the album’s ornately detailed sound by performing on 27 different instruments (including such oddities as a xylophone made of glass).

In the midst of that highly experimental process, he endured an ephemeral but nightmarish period of otherworldly sensations and supernatural visions—an experience that briefly disrupted the album’s creation but in the end helped to enrich Toil and Trouble’s immense emotional depth.

“This album came from thinking about the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be,” says De Augustine. “I used a sort of counter-world as a guide to try to gain some understanding of what’s actually going on here – I had to take myself out of reality in order to try to understand reality.”

At turns bewitching and devastating and ineffably lovely, the result is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty. “The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill” and “Another Universe” follow last fall’s stand-alone double singles “27” and “Hologram,” also recorded, produced, and mixed by De Augustine.

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