You don't have to believe in anything mystical to feel the molecules around you shift just a little when you listen to Kris Delmhorst. Her songs shapeshift like breath turning to mist on a cold, clear night; the inner made visible. With Long Day in the Milky Way, her eighth album, Delmhorst takes a surefooted stride forward. Lush with layered vocals and immersive instrumentation, it finds the gifted lyricist at the height of her craft and working with a strong sense of purpose. Kris Delmhorst will release Long Day in the Milky Way on August 14 via CEN / The Orchard.
World-weary but hopeful, the songwriter responds to a time of global anxiety with a missive straight from the chest. Delmhorst invites the listener to look both out and in, to take in the full kaleidoscope of life's contradictions - frustration, transcendence, heartbreak, love - and to locate the grace within the struggle, the beauty in the dark. "No shame in the long game, look around and see that time is all we got," she sings in "Wind's Gonna Find a Way," the album-opener out today full of subtle swagger, as background vocals and strings coalesce into a weather system all their own - sinuous cloud formations and bright glints of sunlight. "Slow hands in the shadowlands, patient fingers working at the patient knots." In its tagline, the song recommends adopting the persistence of the wind: "Keep on pushing and you'll find a way through."Listen below!
Called "bold and brilliant" by the Boston Globe and "transcendent" by the LA Times, Delmhorst is a veteran of the indie Americana world, with vivid songwriting, soulful delivery, and adventurous arrangements that stretch the limits of genre. She's been compared to artists as various as Anaïs Mitchell, Lucinda Williams, and Juana Molina - though she cites Rickie Lee Jones, in all her fearless joy and complexity, as an artistic north star.
Long Day in the Milky Way marks a surefooted stride forward for Delmhorst: a cohesive distillation of her artistic sensibilities. "I thought a lot about landscape, and about fabric," says Delmhorst of her arrangements. There are few solos on Long Day in the Milky Way; instead, Delmhorst and her band craft a world out of subtle variations that coalesce into larger patterns. "I was thinking about the variations in a handwoven cloth, or in a forest. It called for collective-minded, flexible, non-ego-driven players."Videos