Strawberry Hands Shares New Single Ahead of A JAZZ BLESSING FOR THE ANIMAL LP
Marissa Losoya directed the accompanying video for the Philadelphia songwriter's latest track.
Strawberry Hands, the project of Philadelphia songwriter Jacob Brunner, has shared the second single from his upcoming album, 'What Plant Jumps Over Me?,' along with a Marissa Losoya-directed music video.
An American DIY lifer, Strawberry Hands is what Philadelphia poet, baller, mystic, songwriter Jacob Brunner does. A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, his first widely distributed release, arrives September 18, 2026 on Otherly Love Records.
Brunner explains the song as: 'A binary-form inquiry into the bipolar spectrum: breathlessly enjambed, stream-of-consciousness verses ride a swaggering groove of equal parts grandeur and anger. Then the star burns up, time slows down, the frequencies grow heavy, and I am left in the dark with questions about the burden of consciousness.'
Brunner has long been a mainstay of the Mid-Atlantic house show circuit as Strawberry Hands, as well as a collaborator with fellow world-builders Weyes Blood, Karl Blau, Frank Hurricane, and Little Wings.
The genesis of Strawberry Hands extends back to an early-2000s moment in what used to be meaningfully called 'indie rock' — Romantic, ramshackle independence shaped by Blakean utopian residue and a pre-financial-collapse network of songwriters across New England and the Pacific Northwest who were experimenting with the scale and scope of the form. Phil Elverum, Dave Longstreth, Fred Thomas, the Weisman brothers, and Olivia Tremor Control are touchstones and kindred spirits, extending the tradition toward total art: studio-as-instrument experimentation, fluency with non-rock musics, elaborate arrangements, and sustained investigations into the mysteries of selfhood and reality.
But where Brunner's transcendentalist forebears often tilt outward toward wilderness, Strawberry Hands is more closely aligned with someone like Grouper's Liz Harris or conceptual artist Jacolby Satterwhite — more concerned with finding a balance (or not) between dreams, spirit, memory, alchemical darkness, and a reverence for eros and the disorienting yearnings of the body.
A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, due September 18th on Otherly Love, is the third album in this ever-expanding universe, a crepuscular record made during the small hours in a Germantown bedroom over nine months, by a libidinal, literary mind moving through the back-end of a major depression. It lives at the tenuous borders of things — haunted and sensuous, profane and ethereal, quotidian and transcendent, controlled chance. 'It depends on what you mean by 'real',' as Brunner puts it.
Built on strange doublings, the album features tripled vocals, bass tracks recorded blind and discovered in collision, elements bounced to cassette and folded back into the digital signal, live and MIDI versions of the same part playing simultaneously, slightly out of phase. Brunner's methodology is similarly doubled: random phrases plucked from the wild, reframed as poetry, their meanings reverse-engineered and traced back to some imaginary source. 'Gas No' from a note found on the ground; 'A Jazz Blessing for the Animal' from a church marquee; 'Erroneous Donut Holes' turns his mother's emails into found poetry, then auto-tunes the cut-ups into speech synth liturgy.
There's always been a subtle androgyny to Strawberry Hands, smearing the line between the spectral and the corporeal without resolving it. The governing philosophy, as Brunner tells it, comes from basketball: 'It's okay to want to be Dr. J — to have an ascendant, upward-striving philosophy. But don't lose yourself. Stay rooted. Don't disregard the spiritual possibilities in matter, in food, in fing. It's okay to yearn too high, to learn to fly, so long as you learn to play under the rim.'
The nine tracks move through this cosmology with dream logic — trauma and ambiguous loss, manic swagger dissolving into self-doubt, lust as sacrosanct, death as return. The Strawberry Hands sound expands into new territories: 'Nude Aria Pissant' floats above a Y2K Timbaland booty beat; 'Gas No' is a Bowie-esque torch song; 'Song of Descent' flirts with a Chopped & Screwed purple haze, like Mellow Gold on codeine, to evoke Brunner's descent into himself, a meditation on impermanence and death as a return to peace.
'Dream of Water' is a celestial, country-fried ode to sensuous desire, with pedal steel and strings that recall Townes Van Zandt's Our Mother the Mountain. Lyrics and title were inspired by Zen monk and poet Ikkyu Sojun, whose portrait adorns Brunner's bicep. 'Ikkyu was famous for his red thread zen — the red thread of passion running through everyone. He's a classic holy fool, a spiritual rascal, one of those thinkers who engages seriously with questions of taboo and sensuality.'
'What Plant Jumps Over Me' finds Brunner's falsetto at its most plaintive, uncovering the fork between It Was Hot So We Stayed in the Water, 'Drop It Like It's Hot,' and Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom. The title — scrawled on artist friend Jim Strong's childhood bedroom wall — asks the album's central question: why must I have the burden of consciousness? 'I associate mania with a kind of grandiose spiritual merger with the world,' Brunner explains, 'but also with talking s and nearly getting into fistfights on the basketball court. It's not all delusional positivity.'
The title track closes with Brunner's wager: no consciousness without suffering, no art without consciousness — a Faustian bargain, a jazz blessing. Then the refrain:
I'm some words, I'm some songs, I'm some drums, I'm some dogs, I'm some dishes, I'm some pills, I'm some fish, I'm some cash, I'm some woods loops and half-finished lyrics…
The record moves furthest from autobiography toward a broader struggle for meaning, curious about something approaching the divine, not as religion but as great mystery. Sacred uncertainty — this is the jazz blessing.
We are all the Animal.
Tracklist
Nude Aria Pissant
What Plant Jumps Over Me?
Dream of Water
Queen's Gambit Declined
You'll Never See the Goddess Naked
Song of Descent
Gas No
Erroneous Donut Holes
A Jazz Blessing For The Animal
Tour Dates
East Coast w/ full band:
8/26/2026 Hamden, CT Best Video
8/27/2026 Amherst, MA Belchertown UCC
8/28/2026 Brattleboro, VT Buoyant Heart
8/29/2026 Brooklyn, NY Sunview Luncheonette
8/30/2026 Brooklyn, NY Flower Love World (house show)
9/13/2026 Philadelphia, PA Johnny Brenda's (record release show!)
West Coast (solo):
9/18/2026 Los Angeles, CA Permanent Records
9/19/2026 Santa Cruz, CA Sub Rosa
9/20/2026 San Francisco, CA Adobe Books
9/21/2026 Portland, OR Turn Turn Turn
Photo Credit: Garvin Kelly
Photo Credit: Garvin Kelly
