Girlyman performs on Folk Alley.

The Atlanta band has been a mainstay on the folk circuit for more than 10 years. In "Empire of Our State," Girlyman tenderly explores the complex middle ground between loving and leaving.

The world is full of love songs. Unrequited love, romantic and lustful love, poetic and sensual love — they're all more than covered. Plenty of tunes address betrayal and broken hearts, but actual relationship aren't so black-and-white. Confusing and captivating emotions lie just beneath the surface of even the simplest smitten love, and breakups are rarely as definitive as they're often portrayed in popular music.

Still, comparatively few songs are written about the complexity of love's gray areas — particularly when relationships evolve from one thing to another. What of the spectrum of connection between two people?

In "Empire of Our State," Girlyman (Ty Greenstein, Doris Muramatsu, JJ Jones and Nate Borofsky) tackles this wider field of evolving emotions, singing about "not a bitter end, but the end of something." It's a song about welcoming the unknown and giving yourself over to wherever a relationship might take you. According to the band, "Empire of Our State" is about the possibility of "changing the form of a relationship from romance into something else" — a process that's unknown and undefinable, yet richly satisfying, like the song itself.

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