The Welcome Wagon have shared a brand new song, “I Can Cross the Sea,” and a new video. The video captures the live recording of the song (take 12, according to Vito), as performed in May this year at the height of lockdown at St. Paul’s Luthern Church in Brooklyn. Vito Aiuto is on vocals and guitar, Monique Aiuto on vocals, Jeremy McDonald (Mason Jar Music) on bass, Evan Gregory (Gregory Brothers) on piano, and Anthony LaMarca (War on Drugs) on lead guitar and drums.

You can listen and share the song here, or watch below. We’ll also be hosting a hang out with The Welcome Wagon on Monday November 1st on our Instagram account here.

Vito has penned a missive with the song:

The moon grows full and fat, then diminishes again. A family finishes dinner, the clink of dishes in the sink, then gathers in the living room in front of the television to watch together. Next door a widow watches the same show on her own set. You buy a horseshoe at the antique market. Later on you’re eating carrot sticks and searching for information on horseshoes (Does it hurt the horse when they nail it on? No, not if it’s done correctly), and your internet goes out and is absent the rest of the day. The emptiness! Long ago you used to be so much younger, you never woke up in the night, gasping for breath, petrified, (well, wait, yes, you did, that night terrors thing in 3rd grade) but now sometimes you’re not sure you could say what life even is. You recall you’ve become unmoored like this before (isn’t it strange, the consolation contained in your previous moments of utter confusion and despair?), there’s precedent here. And after a length of time—sometimes an afternoon, sometimes a summer—you feel on top of it again. Got your bearings. Back at it! Yet the questions keep falling like leaves, sometimes flying right in your face: Does the rain have a father? Am I lovely? What are all these keys for? Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Tell me, Momma! Yet you can be sure of just one thing: Your very own broken heart is not just a mountain, it’s a whole mountain range, winding, wild, steep, indomitable, impassable, unsafe, jagged with…. Look, it’s a mountain range, that’s what I’m telling you: You can’t even understand a dandelion, let alone a mountain range, you know? And that’s where you live, in the mountain range of your broken heart, lost, lonely, drifting, underneath a sky that’s green and sick and drifting, the confusion like fog (or the fog of confusion, I don’t know which), and then…

Then some innocent afternoon arrives and there’s a door you must walk through. Just one, solitary door. Or a broomstick over which to jump: this broomstick, not another. Or you arrive at the shore of an enormous body of water and it must be crossed, there’s not another choice. And that’s the gift. I don’t mean that the journey you’re about to undertake is a gift: no way, friend, the journey is a half a nightmare: there are monsters in there (bad ones), the waves are canyons, your little bark is a goner. No, the gift is that at least you know what is being asked of you. Finally, for a moment, life is reduced to one thing: This choice. This journey. This word to say. Or not to say. This chance to forgive. This promise to keep. Or start keeping again.

This is a song we wrote for people who have to cross great seas and bear great burdens. This is a song for people who are fighting the good fight. We love you and we’re rooting for you like crazy.

The Welcome Wagon.