It’s September and hoops season is so close you can almost taste it. But anticipation comes with its inconveniences: the Knicks missed out on Donovan Mitchell and seasonal depression really is a thing. JW Francis seems to have the feelers for it as well on his new tune “I Wanna Be Your Basketball”, a tragicomical duet with fellow artist Margaux.
We see Francis bouncing up the walls in anxiety, funnelling some of that nervous energy into other past-time activities. As the perfect foil to his frenzied state, Margaux delivers her part of the song with a playing-it-cool blasé. Francis slowly rallies, though, when he parks out at the court, going from an elusive air dunk to a silky nothing-but-net jumper that would make Steph Curry nod in approval.
“The song is about a feeling I’ve been singing a lot about lately – the feeling of wanting to break out and be something else,” Francis comments, certainly relishing the rare glints of victory when you’re operating outside of your wheelhouse. Which obviously is something a lot of artists had to pursue during the Covid pandemic. “I Wanna Be Your Basketball” offers another peak inside JW Francis’s new LP Dream House (which can be preordered here).
“Over the past three years, I have received over 300 requests from fans to write songs for their loved ones,” he reveals. “All of the songs on Dream House come from this project, some of them have been reworked to speak more to the artist’s life, others have remained exactly as they were first written. Ultimately, this is an album about caring for others, and the way we express it.”
Dream House will be released on UK label Sunday Best Recordings on January 27th, 2023. Watch the video for “I Wanna Be Your Basketball” below and check it out on streaming outlets.
