On 15 November, Sufjan Stevens and Sharon van Etten collaborator Cat Martino will release her first new album as Stranger Cat since 2015's In the Wilderness. Titled Slow Jam Love Letters to My Body in Pieces, it's a work of healing and surrender, created through a confrontation with her darkest moments and the physical and emotional recovery process that followed.

As Martino explains in the press release, she went through 18 months of rehab for a dance injury only to have a life-threatening accident that damaged both her legs and left her "healing in a wheelchair for five months." Doctors predicted that she might never dance again and that she might need to walk with a cane for the rest of her life. Fortunately neither of those predictions came true, but Martino's new songs were largely written and demo'd in that dark in-between time when nothing was certain.

Martino says her goal with Slow Jam Love Letters... was to give herself and her listeners "permission to feel everything, then dance and let it all go – the kind of dance you do alone when no one is looking," and lead single "Witness" does just that.

A few months after recording the demo for "Witness", with a microphone taped above her bed, Martino was mobile enough to travel to the historic Guillaume Tell studio in Paris to record it, playing all the vintage instruments herself. "I was thinking, show your pain but make it sexy, make it art," she says. "It felt like I was in an intimate relationship with my own body, writing to it as my Lover, my Muse."

In a lyric video for the track, Martino uses slo-mo footage of herself dancing without a care at an art party – shot by a friend on a phone camera – to express the song's essence.

As she explains, "I had the idea to sync it to 'Witness' and it just felt right (and so light since I poured hundreds of hours into every other video for the album)," adding:

"The song is about all of us needing our most vulnerable pain to be seen and witnessed somehow, be it an individual or a group of people. But seeing this fancy free video, I realized I wanted my freedom and light to be witnessed, to be a celebration too. I love how the song and video were created with such different energies."

Slow Jam Love Letters to My Body in Pieces tracklist:

1. Come My Darlin To The Sea
2. Witness
3. Promise Me
4. Interlude 1 
5. Hollow Heartbreak
6. Sufferin
7. Interlude 2
8. Doin It Right 
9. Périlleux
10. 1 Step 2 Steps