"Lingering, Reflective, & Raw:” Ginger Winn Opens Up About the Grief & Growth of ‘Freeze Frame’
by mitch mosk of atwood magazine
Kingston-based singer/songwriter Ginger Winn opens up about loss, healing, and finding her voice on her intimate and achingly raw sophomore album. There’s a powerful ache rippling through Ginger Winn’s sophomore album – one that lingers long after the final notes fade. Released June 13th via Keep Good Company Records, Freeze Frame is intimate and enchanting, heavy and wondrous: A soul-stirring collection that wears its heart on its sleeve, tender and trembling and unafraid to feel it all. Grief lives here; so does healing, and so does love.
Where her 2024 debut Stop-Motion leaned into bright, sun-kissed synths, this record dives headfirst into the rawness of loss. Winn captures life in delicate moments – the kind we wish we could hold onto forever – and sets them to music that shimmers and sighs like a snowfall at midnight. Written partially in the aftermath of her father’s sudden passing and recorded in the heart of a Cincinnati snowstorm, Freeze Frame reckons with impermanence through unflinching honesty and raw vulnerability. With the help of producer and engineer AJ Yorio and a circle of close collaborators, Winn brings her inner world to life in fourteen fragile, fervent songs. The result is a deeply human record that embraces stillness and change, presence and movement – an emotional exhale from an artist finding strength through surrender.
“Freeze Frame is the most emotional project I’ve ever made. It holds my new grief, my longing, and all the tiny moments that pulled me through,” Winn shares. “This album feels more like me, like the version of me that grew up in Charleston, surrounded by ghost stories and shadows. People always used to say I had a haunting voice, and this record leans into that… It feels like coming home.” Now based in Kingston, NY, Winn threads a sense of place and purpose throughout her work. Her music is as much a reflection of the landscapes she inhabits as the feelings she carries – timeless, ghostly, and grounded in truth. Freeze Frame doesn’t just showcase a songwriter in bloom; it reveals an artist willing to freeze time long enough to show us what it means to feel, to lose, and to carry on with our stories, our emotions, and our memories. “We were just creating something real,” Winn adds. “It’s a document of everything I was feeling and going through, and it’s grounded in the people around me and the moments I wanted to hold on to.”
Read our interview with Ginger Winn below, and listen to Freeze Frame, out now!
MM: For those who are getting to know you, can you share a bit about yourself and what got you into songwriting and recording?
Gw: I’m a Southern girl from Charleston, South Carolina, so Charleston’s always where the story starts. Both my parents were musicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, so I guess I was bound to be all of those things too. My dad taught me ukulele when I was a baby, and my mom started teaching me guitar when I was around nine. I began writing songs at 14 or 15, dropped out of school at 16, and started doing music full time. Almost ten years later, here I am releasing album number two.
MM: It’s been a wild ride. It’s been nearly a year since your debut album Stop-Motion came out. How do you feel about that record now?
GW: Stop-Motion really captured where I was at the time. I had just moved back from Cape Town and was experimenting with pop, inspired by artists like Taylor Swift who I’ve always looked up to. David Baron produced the album and has this incredible collection of vintage synths, so the sound naturally leaned pop. Looking back, those songs still mean a lot to me. They were the first I wrote with my co-writer Matthew, and they’ll always hold a special place in my set and in my heart. You’ve since made Kingston, New York your home base. Has the move there I’ve absolutely fallen in love with Kingston… the landscape, the people, the community. It reminds me a bit of the South with all the trees and open space, but it’s got its own vibe too. I’ve made real friends here for the first time in a long time, and that’s impacted my happiness more than I expected. While I haven’t written a lot since moving here (because Freeze Frame was mostly written in 2022–2024), I can feel that the next batch of songs will reflect this sense of community, stability, and joy.
MM: Your new album Freeze Frame drops nearly a year and a week after Stop-Motion. What's the story behind this record?
GW: Most of Freeze Frame was written while I was living in Cape Town. A lot of it was co-written with Matthew, and initially it was about emotional growth and processing subtle forms of loss. But then I lost my dad, and the whole meaning of the album shifted. When we recorded in January, it had only been two months since he passed, so all that emotion ended up getting poured into the recordings. We also wrote two new songs during that time, “Freezing” and “Blizzard”, which became important anchors for the project.