March 27 street date. 2021 JUNO Nominee: Adult Alternative Album Of the Year. Somewhere in the middle of making her new album, Are You in Love?, Basia Bulat took almost a whole year off. Because she had fallen in love, because her father died, because she had lost her sense of beauty and where it might be hidden. I want to make a really beautiful record about compassion, she had written to Jim James, the My Morning Jacket frontman, who had also produced 2016’s Good Advice. And the Mojave Desert had seemed perfect: the site for a quest. Inspired by singer-songwriters like Minnie Ripperton, Dolly Parton and Silvio Rodriguez, Bulat imagined a record full of sun-ups and sunsets – its lyrics so naked she was almost afraid to write them down. In the end, some of the words came easy—like the title track, or the Instagram-uncanny “Hall of Mirrors.” But the essence of others was much more difficult to express, tangled up in desire and reinvention. Bulat pushed herself to be more vulnerable, testing new kinds of collaboration: Are You in Love? includes lyrics written with a friend, U.S. Girls‘ Meg Remy, and everything from melting keyboard parts to desert field recordings by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Woods, whom Bulat married last summer. Still, the record wasn’t finished when Bulat left the desert, coming home to Montreal. “[I found] I was struggling between keeping it together and letting go,” Bulat explains. It would be nine more months before she was ready again to listen to her own voice—a process of grief, but also forgiveness and love. The result is a startling + gorgeous desert record, a singer who refuses to hide. “No Control” flashes like a girl-group’s stare, while “Your Girl” has Bulat cruising down the highway, doing her best Christine McVie. The album’s gradually thunderous closing tune, “Love Is At The End of the World,” is a blazing ever-after—and maybe the most thrilling thing Bulat has ever made.
March 27 street date. 2021 JUNO Nominee: Adult Alternative Album Of the Year. Somewhere in the middle of making her new album, Are You in Love?, Basia Bulat took almost a whole year off. Because she had fallen in love, because her father died, because she had lost her sense of beauty and where it might be hidden. I want to make a really beautiful record about compassion, she had written to Jim James, the My Morning Jacket frontman, who had also produced 2016’s Good Advice. And the Mojave Desert had seemed perfect: the site for a quest. Inspired by singer-songwriters like Minnie Ripperton, Dolly Parton and Silvio Rodriguez, Bulat imagined a record full of sun-ups and sunsets – its lyrics so naked she was almost afraid to write them down. In the end, some of the words came easy—like the title track, or the Instagram-uncanny “Hall of Mirrors.” But the essence of others was much more difficult to express, tangled up in desire and reinvention. Bulat pushed herself to be more vulnerable, testing new kinds of collaboration: Are You in Love? includes lyrics written with a friend, U.S. Girls‘ Meg Remy, and everything from melting keyboard parts to desert field recordings by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Woods, whom Bulat married last summer. Still, the record wasn’t finished when Bulat left the desert, coming home to Montreal. “[I found] I was struggling between keeping it together and letting go,” Bulat explains. It would be nine more months before she was ready again to listen to her own voice—a process of grief, but also forgiveness and love. The result is a startling + gorgeous desert record, a singer who refuses to hide. “No Control” flashes like a girl-group’s stare, while “Your Girl” has Bulat cruising down the highway, doing her best Christine McVie. The album’s gradually thunderous closing tune, “Love Is At The End of the World,” is a blazing ever-after—and maybe the most thrilling thing Bulat has ever made.
Please note new street date: April 1 (CD) / May 6 (LP). Introducing "The Garden": a STRINGS ALBUM and a RETROSPECTIVE from a room in Montreal with the windows open, and the wind moving, and the leaves changing, and a spring-coloured secret on the tip of Basia Bulat's tongue. The band made it in a pandemic. Bulat and her old friend Mark Lawson, with whom she recorded the Polaris- and Juno-nominated album "Tall Tall Shadow". Bulat and her husband, Legal Vertigo's Andy Woods. Bulat and her friends Ben Whiteley, Zou Zou Robidoux, Jen Thiessen, John Corban, and Tomo Newton, four fifths of whom form a string quartet, because did we mention this is a STRINGS ALBUM? Not a greatest hits but a re-configuration: a chance to record anew some songs that Bulat didn't fully understand when she originally composed them, five or ten or fifteen years ago. "The Garden" gathers fourteen string arrangements by three different arrangers (Owen Pallett, Paul Frith, and Zou Zou Robidoux), revisiting material from all five of Bulat's studio albums.
Please note new street date: May 6 (LP) / April 1 (CD). Introducing "The Garden": a STRINGS ALBUM and a RETROSPECTIVE from a room in Montreal with the windows open, and the wind moving, and the leaves changing, and a spring-coloured secret on the tip of Basia Bulat's tongue. The band made it in a pandemic. Bulat and her old friend Mark Lawson, with whom she recorded the Polaris- and Juno-nominated album "Tall Tall Shadow". Bulat and her husband, Legal Vertigo's Andy Woods. Bulat and her friends Ben Whiteley, Zou Zou Robidoux, Jen Thiessen, John Corban, and Tomo Newton, four fifths of whom form a string quartet, because did we mention this is a STRINGS ALBUM? Not a greatest hits but a re-configuration: a chance to record anew some songs that Bulat didn't fully understand when she originally composed them, five or ten or fifteen years ago. "The Garden" gathers fourteen string arrangements by three different arrangers (Owen Pallett, Paul Frith, and Zou Zou Robidoux), revisiting material from all five of Bulat's studio albums.
February 21 street date. "Basia's Palace" got its start in 2022. A new home, a new family, a pause: the singer was finally finding time to hear her own thoughts, to think about old stories, to boot up her Nintendo to play Dragon Warrior 4. The album that emerged from this - that started in dawn-kissed synth instrumentals, lyrics scribbled down in a Hayao Miyazaki notebook - is the softest and most questing of Basia Bulat's career. "Basia's Palace" is like a time-travel score, with Bulat as Chrono Trigger's intrepid adventurer, going back into the past to shape the events of the future. After years of releasing records where live performance came first, the singer-songwriter wanted to express herself in a completely different way, composing with MIDI instead of piano/guitar. Reuniting with co-producer Mark Lawson, she found herself moving through a dreamworld of whispers, synths, early Eurovision tunes - and her great uncle’s gauzy Maryla Rodowicz and Marek Grechuta LPs. Throughout, Bulat pays tribute to the magic of creation and the spellwork of performance.
February 21 street date. "Basia's Palace" got its start in 2022. A new home, a new family, a pause: the singer was finally finding time to hear her own thoughts, to think about old stories, to boot up her Nintendo to play Dragon Warrior 4. The album that emerged from this - that started in dawn-kissed synth instrumentals, lyrics scribbled down in a Hayao Miyazaki notebook - is the softest and most questing of Basia Bulat's career. "Basia's Palace" is like a time-travel score, with Bulat as Chrono Trigger's intrepid adventurer, going back into the past to shape the events of the future. After years of releasing records where live performance came first, the singer-songwriter wanted to express herself in a completely different way, composing with MIDI instead of piano/guitar. Reuniting with co-producer Mark Lawson, she found herself moving through a dreamworld of whispers, synths, early Eurovision tunes - and her great uncle’s gauzy Maryla Rodowicz and Marek Grechuta LPs. Throughout, Bulat pays tribute to the magic of creation and the spellwork of performance.
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2010/01/26
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