Maybe Means No by Jill Whit

Dan Wriggins is a Philadelphia-based songwriter, musician, and poet. He grew up in the town of Yarmouth, Maine, and on Islesford, a small island community near Bar Harbor. He worked on lobster fishing boats before moving to Philadelphia and starting the alt-country band Friendship in 2015, with whom he has toured the US and Canada extensively. He lives and sometimes tours with his dog, Roy.

On “Still Is,” Wriggins sings five songs by American labor organizer, musician, and storyteller Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips (1935-2008). The EP covers some of Utah’s favorite themes: pacifism, the plight and rights of the American worker, memory, and trains. Wriggins recorded the songs to tape at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, RI, with the exception of “Going Away,” recorded by Dave Settle on Mike Cormier’s porch in Philadelphia, with Cormier and Jon Samuels accompanying. 

“This Land is Not Your Land” is Utah’s revision of the Woody Guthrie standard. Wriggins adds his own verses, partially inspired by the David Graeber book “Bullshit Jobs.”

Wriggins explains:

“I was on a lobster boat stuffing dead herring into bait bags when I first heard “Enola Gay” on the Downeast Maine community radio station WERU. My captain Teddy told me “that’s the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest.” I’ve ever since been inspired by Utah Phillips’ clarity and courage.

Quaker sociologist and peace activist Elise Boulding talks about a “200-year present,” a way of contextualizing our lives and politics with those who came before and will come after us. Utah calls it the “long memory.” These days we lurch from one crisis to another, faster and faster. It’s important to remember that most of the struggles that seem unprecedented have in fact been struggled before, many times over. Utah cared as deeply about the future as he did about the past. I titled this EP “Still Is” to honor the grouchy indignance I hear in Utah’s voice when he answers interview questions that put folk music, labor organizing, or civil disobedience in the past tense.”
credits
releases May 7, 2021

All songs by Utah Phillips, except verses 2 & 3 of "This Land is Not Our Land," by Dan Wriggins

"This Land is Not Our Land," "I Think of You," "All Used Up," and "Enola Gay" recorded to tape, mixed, and mastered by Brad Kreiger at Big Nice Studio

"Going Away" recorded to tape and mixed by Dave Settle, originally aired in November 2020 on Dave's podcast, Under the First Floor

on "Going Away:"
Michael Cormier: organ
Jon Samuels: guitar
Dan Wriggins: guitar, vox

all other songs:
Dan Wriggins: guitar, accordion, vox

Cover drawing by Owen Ashworth

This Land is Not Our Land by Dan Wriggins

"Prism Song" taken from the album Rooms With Walls and Windows
Limited edition colored vinyl LP, compact disc & digital out now on Orindal Records

Pre-order at <a href="http://orindal.limitedrun.com/products/520228">orindal.com</a>

BUY LPs, CDs + DIGITAL

Prism Song by Julie Byrne

Keep On Raging by Julie Byrne

Held Together by Lisa/Liza

Take On Thee

"Deep Ecology" taken from the Young Moon album Triggered by Sunsets, out June 30, 2023 on Orindal Records
https://youngmoonmusic.bandcamp.com/

Deep Ecology

A camera zooms in without crowding its subject. A song about someone else’s damage helps you understand your own, & puts you on to new mysteries. Stars look like grains of sand. On Little Kid’s new album & Orindal Records debut A Million Easy Payments, the urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics, epic ballads & reveries that come at life from all angles & exposures, driving at & a little over the limits of self-reflection. The band’s lilting folk rock arrangements carry Boothby’s stories, occasionally lifting them skyward with flurries of cello samples, pedal steel, flute, & electric piano. It’s a record of depression & frustration that doesn’t stew in piety or aestheticize pain, that also explodes with life. Fragile & abundant. It’s a record with blood in its veins.

Little Kid is a Toronto-based collaborative project that has existed in some form since 2009, & is currently comprised of Brodie Germain (drums, guitar), Paul Vroom (bass), Megan Lunn (vocals, banjo, keyboard), Liam Cole (drums, percussion), & Kenny Boothby (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards). A Million Easy Payments, like the three Little Kid releases before it, was tracked, engineered, & mastered by Vroom. Vroom’s work renders a portrait of Little Kid’s twin musical strengths — as a live act, a straight-ahead folk rock outfit, & as a group of creative, independent producers who want to mess things up. To that end, the record features several guest instruments: Eliza Niemi’s cello, Anh Phung’s flute, Seth Engel’s percussion, Peter Gill’s pedal steel, & Aaron Powell’s voice. Every so often, the boundaries fray. Chaotic flute layers transport the outro to “Beside Myself.” Banjo careens off the edge of “Something to Say.” The kick drum in “Bad Energy” is more than a heartbeat. 

Like a minimalist composition, an Emily Dickinson poem, a Frankenthaler painting, early Sufjan Stevens, or the songs of many of Little Kid’s new labelmates at Orindal, A Million Easy Payments is brilliant insofar as it teems with texture & meaning under an outward image of simplicity. A peacock in sheep’s clothing. Its lyrical & musical density never comes at the expense of clarity or striking melodies. Like your favorite movie or novel, you come back to A Million Easy Payments again & again for the pleasure of its beauty, but also because it reveals something new every time.

Little Kid has always centered around Boothby’s songwriting, & A Million Easy Payments proves his enormous skill many times over. He tackles the extended ballad tradition, zooming in and out with mind-bending control on “Bad Energy”:

And now your engine burns remains of ancient birds
Go into town to drive around and then leave
You tore a gash right clear through the atmosphere
And now there’s nothing that can buffer the heat
But the sun is shining and your love is smiling
In a moment getting warmed by a beam
Of bad energy

Boothby’s writing is charged with love, absence, stagnation & change, often refracted through the lens of Christian thought, experienced by friends, exes, everyday people & Biblical characters. Later on in “Bad Energy,” Boothby jokes “if you’re only friendly with a dozen men/ one might still kill you with a kiss on the cheek.” In “Eggshell,” a ghost reflects on his own death to his widow, a story based on the death of Boothby’s father: “ambulances came/ weaving a whining siren down the highway/ leaving a smiling silence in your life, babe.” The “I” sound woven in descending melodies. Two lanes of Boothby’s airy tenor. Two lanes of guitar.

Across A Million Easy Payments, Boothby’s dexterity, rhythm, internal rhyming prowess, & ear for poetic sound are matched only by the pathos of his stories. The words are crafted deliberately, not to show off mastery, but to share hard-earned findings. To try & see the self in context & up close, & to prove the inquiry to be both futile & crucial. To dig around for God. The pool is murky. Not as reflective as we’d hoped.

"Bad Energy" by Little Kid

"Something to Say" is the first single & leadoff track from A Million Easy Payments, the quietly masterful new album by Toronto, ON indie folk/alt-country band Little Kid.

"Something to Say" single is out November 28, 2023
A Million Easy Payments album is out February 23, 2024 
Released by Orindal Records (US) & Gold Day Recordings (UK)

https://littlekidmusic.com
https://orindal.com
https://golddayrecs.com


From A Million Easy Payments album bio by Dan Wriggins:

A camera zooms in without crowding its subject. A song about someone else’s damage helps you understand your own, & puts you on to new mysteries. Stars look like grains of sand. On Little Kid’s new album & Orindal Records debut A Million Easy Payments, the urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics, epic ballads & reveries that come at life from all angles & exposures, driving at & a little over the limits of self-reflection. The band’s lilting folk rock arrangements carry Boothby’s stories, occasionally lifting them skyward with flurries of cello samples, pedal steel, flute, & electric piano. It’s a record of depression & frustration that doesn’t stew in piety or aestheticize pain, that also explodes with life. Fragile & abundant. It’s a record with blood in its veins.

"Something To Say" by Little Kid

Robert Stillman- Rainbow
(ORD-17)
Release date: January 15, 2016
Order CD/LP/digital: http://orindal.limitedrun.com/products/560467

Rainbow is the new album by Robert Stillman. To the extent that music, especially that which is wordless, can describe life, Rainbow serves as a window into the past four years of Stillman’s own: a time of birth, death, love, and learning, and through these things, a new willingness to look the world in the eye.

The album is structured around dedications: to his wife, Anna; to his late daughter Ruth, and his second-born daughter Romilly; to the landscape of his adopted home in East Kent; and to his blue station wagon, Warren.

After two recent projects with his ensemble The Archaic Future Players (Station Wagon Interior Perspective; Leap of Death), Rainbow represents a return to the loner working methods of 2011’s Machine Song, with Stillman building up intricate arrangements from multi-tracked recordings of himself on all instruments. Rainbow also marks the return of Stillman’s tenor saxophone, a sound not heard in such a prominent role in his music since his 2006 debut, Robert Stillman’s Horses. With these trusted methods and tools, Stillman explores new stylistic territory, reconciling influences as disparate as the Brazilian psychedelia of Milton Nascimento with the uninhibited poetics of Ornette Coleman, the “Social Music” volume of Harry Smith’s Folkways anthology with the early electronic Klangstudie of Herbert Eimert. Stillman’s singing voice is also heard for the first time, in a recording made during a walk with his daughter through the field described in the song’s lyrics.

The musical diversity on this album is no doubt a product of Stillman’s varied musical life, which started with saxophone lessons in his native Portland, Maine. A move to Boston at age 18 to study jazz introduced him to the like-minded colleagues with whom he’d later move to New York, including future members of bands such as Glass Ghost, Dirty Projectors, Caveman, and Here We Go Magic. Upon moving to New York in 2001, this circle was widened further to include new collaborators such as Luke Temple, Chris and Kurt Weisman, and members of the band Grizzly Bear; since relocating to England, Stillman has worked in bands led by Kit Downes and Tom Skinner.

Over the course of his career, Stillman has toured extensively, playing a variety of venues both as a solo “one-man band” of piano and foot-percussion, and with ensembles of various instrumentations, and he has supported acts such as Deerhoof, Yo La Tengo, Dirty Projectors, and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

As He Walked Into The Field

Deserts of Youth by Lisa/Liza is out now! https://orindalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/deserts-of-youth

Lisa/Liza is the lo-fi, psych-folk recording project of Maine-based guitarist, singer and songwriter Liza Victoria. Deserts of Youth is her debut LP, after numerous limited edition cassette and CDr releases. Deserts of Youth is an intimate collection of seven original songs, recorded at home by Victoria, using just her voice and her acoustic guitar.

Liza explains:
"Deserts of Youth is an album about the parts of our past that remain within us, and visiting these landscapes with recognition of ourselves instead of a meditation on what has been lost, or is no longer a resource or a path we can use. It is about meeting the past and facing it with a sense of ownership instead of abandon; the idea that one can see a desert as a place of desolation or a place of needed reflection, full of life, and strength."

Praise for "Century Woods," the first single from Deserts of Youth:

"Carried on the lightest of breezes, ('Century Woods') manages to take on numerous foreboding shapes thanks to the fragile, spectral nature of Victoria’s utterly compelling lead vocal, that never once deviates from the path, never once stops to check whether anyone is following, but drags you through the entire piece regardless.
It’s a wonderful piece of work, a fragile expanse that seems to fold in on itself, like a forest slowly departing in the shrivelling, encroaching dusk."
-Tom Johnson, GoldFlakePaint

"'Century Woods' exists outside of time entirely. Victoria opens the song in a drifting, half-existent time signature, her careful, close-mic’d guitar lapping gently like sleepy waves at high tide. Her vocals reverberate powerfully without an ounce of reverb. The song’s dry production—seemingly no overdubs or effects at all—actually makes it sound even more mysterious: the magic is entirely in her performance. Six minutes in, as the song’s jazzy, Karen-Dalton-on-ambien melody begins to settle into your brain, it just kind of ends. The last sentence is left unfinished, the chord progression unresolved. Victoria’s haunting, imagistic dream logic is only beginning to reveal itself."
-Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork

http://orindal.limitedrun.com/products/574775

Century Woods

"The Lonesome Border, Pt 1" is taken from the Dear Nora album Mountain Rock

Vinyl LP out January 13, 2017 on Orindal Records

Pre-order: http://orindal.limitedrun.com/products/575638

Dear Nora live dates:
1/13 - Olympia, WA @ Obsidian ^
1/14 - Seattle, WA @ Black Lodge ^
1/15 - Portland, OR @ Turn! Turn! Turn! ^
1/16 - Portland, OR @ Reed College ^
1/18 - Oakland, CA @ The Night Light ^
1/19 - Los Angeles, CA @ Bootleg Theater ^
1/21 - Las Vegas, NV @ 11th Street Records ^
1/22 - Flagstaff, AZ @ Firecreek Coffee ^
1/23 - Phoenix, AZ @ Trunk Space ^
1/25 - San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar ^
1/26 - Tijuana, MX @ Mous Tache ^
1/28 - San Francisco, CA @ Makeout Room ^

^ w/ Stephen Steinbrink

Dear Nora- The Lonesome Border, Pt 1

The seventh & penultimate track from the Friendship CD/LP Shock out of Season
out November 3, 2017 on Orindal Records
www.orindal.com

"Skip to the Good Part"

Smoke is coming from your ears

I can see the turning of the gears

it’s a hell of a distance from your hand to your beer

if anything changes, I’m right here

it’s a hell of a distance between you and me

or just our accumulated biases

where oh where could my little dog me

overall you gave it “satisfactory”

but please don’t call it a night

the river is coursing, it’s your life

this is exactly what it looks like

I hope you hang around

you’re always welcome

You’re not imposing

But come on, make up your mind

Feeling so wholly unprepared

it wasn’t much of a distance to the 4-h fair

what holds you up, what makes you scared?

something like “I need your love like I need air”

What was that? sometimes you mumble

our days are few and so full of trouble

my feet don’t listen, they stumble

and feel the cliff begin to unmoral

but please don’t call it a night

the river is coursing, you can bet your life

this is exactly what it looks like

it’s good to know you

but if you’re gonna hang around

don’t ruin everything

But come on, make up your mind

Smoke is coming from your ears

There stands the solo cup, my dear

there stands the dog, no foxes here

there stands the news, there stands our only prayer

Did you think you could just muscle through?

skip to the end of the interview?

our days are full of shit and so few

if you feel regret before you even get out of bed

there stands that too

but please don’t call it a night

the river is coursing, it’s your life

this is exactly what it looks like

I hope you hang around

you’re always welcome

you are everything

you can take as long as you want

everything is gonna be fine

Friendship - Skip To The Good Part

Dear Nora - White Fur

Moon Racer - New Crush

lyrics by Katy Davidson and Franz Prichard
vocals and guitar: Katy Davidson
bass: Zach Burba
drums: Greg Campanile

ASCAP
Writer: Kathryn Lloyd Davidson
Publisher: Solo Wanderer

Skulls Example

Dear Nora - Sunset On Humanity

There's Always Glimmer

Smoke by Gia Margaret

"Birthday" is the first single from Gia Margaret's debut album, THERE'S ALWAYS GLIMMER, out 7/27/18 on Orindal Records.

Pre-order vinyl + digital now at http://orindal.com

Chicago singer/songwriter/producer Gia Margaret describes her music as “sleep rock.” It’s a genre all her own, combining elements of folk, shoegaze, slowcore, ambient electronica and trip hop. For her self-produced debut album, There’s Always Glimmer (out July 27, 2018 on Orindal Records), Gia Margaret crafted twelve gorgeously melancholic lullabies to combat her own insomnia, and to salvage some beauty from the brighter and darker moments of her life.

There’s Always Glimmer explores relationships between friends, family members and significant others, often in past tense. Sparse verses isolate mundane moments of domestic and urban life, and choruses ache with earnest expressions of yearning and loss. The disarmingly simple language of Gia Margaret’s lyrics, when carried by the melodic sparkle of her singing voice, have the power to elevate an ordinary moment into something supremely nostalgic and sentimental. A ride on a train, a hand on a shoulder, a dog in a yard, the light of the moon through an apartment window are each made significant and sacred, worthy of examination and preservation.

As much as it addresses the unease in our lives, each song on There’s Always Glimmer is steeped in loving comfort, awash with gentle sounds to usher the still minutes before dreams come, when we’re left alone amidst the shadows and the echoes of our memory. There’s Always Glimmer exists to fill the darkness and the quiet.

Birthday by Gia Margaret

Groceries by Gia Margaret

Taken from the album Unconditional Love (ORD-37)

Matt Bachmann (b. 1988, Chicago) is a musician/composer/songwriter based in New York. Maybe best known for his bass plucking in Mega Bog, the Seattle-New York-anywhere fresh music nest of Erin Birgy, Matt’s also spent time on the road with Hand Habits, Happy You, and iji. 

In 2015, Matt released In Between on Help Yourself Records under the name Big Eater, the name under which much of Matt’s recorded and performed song-oriented music has been collected up until now. In 2016, Matt released Salt and Love Shape on his own label, Left Door Tapes, this time eschewing the song-writing moniker of Big Eater and releasing the albums under the name. These two 2016 albums show another side of Matt’s musical output: repetitive, patient drone music that explore unconventional, seemingly rootless harmonies. The songwriting process and the ambient, meditative process had always been kept separate by the two names, but in 2018 Matt retired the name Big Eater in an effort to bring together both processes. Bringing everything under the name of Matt Bachmann re-invests each project with the holistic intimacy of their shared origin (Matt himself), under the honest heading of his name. 

Matt’s latest record, Unconditional Love, will be released on tape via Orindal Records in November 2018. Unconditional Love represents the union of Matt’s always various approaches to music-making. It paints a restrained, sparse sonic picture with a limited and carefully applied sonic palette. The album brings the spare, focused impulse of Salt and Love Shape into the frame of Matt’s songwriting, resulting in what Matt calls “clear, intimate, egoless playing: every sound in support of the song.” Within this sonic framework the album works through a larger narrative process to express themes of a peaceful but foreboding calmness opening up into a focus on friendship and love. The uncomfortable themes of the first part of the record – isolation, death of a parent – are presented with generous powers of observation without succumbing to the power of their negativity. The steady, unhurried tarrying with these feelings pays off in the final part of the record, which opens up into the joyful positivity of the mutual support, the family ties, and the friendships with which we build our lives. 

Unconditional Love is written by Matt Bachmann and recorded by Matt, Keith Nelson, Brady Custis, and Kyle Boston. Engineered mostly by Keith with Brady guest engineering in some places. Derek Baron (also formerly of Mega Bog) played drums, trumpet, trombone, and signal processing in some places, and Erin Birgy sang. Matt mixed the record and James Krivchenia (of Big Thief) mastered it.

Unconditional Love

To Be In Love by Matt Bachmann

"Wolfman" is the second single from Claire Cronin's forthcoming album, Big Dread Moon, out June 14, 2019 on Orindal Records.

orindal.com

Wolfman by Claire Cronin

https://moon-racer.bandcamp.com/track/you-can-feel-bad

"You Can Feel Bad" written by Matraca Berg & Tim Krekel
Published by EMI Longitude Music, Mighty Nice Music, Songs of Universal Inc (BMI)

MOON RACER ON TOUR
June 14 Winston Salem, NC @ Monstercade (w/ Jaguardini & Transport 77)
June 15 Athens, GA @ Georgia Theatre Rooftop (w/ Eureka California)
June 17 Cincinnati, OH @ The Listing Loon (w/ Brooklynn Rae)
June 19 Louisville, KY @ Saint Cat’s - Our Lady of the Good Couch (w/ Emily Yacina & R.L. Kelly)
June 21 Chicago, IL @ The Hungry Brain (w/ Claire Cronin & Advance Base)
June 24 Ypsilanti, MI @ Ziggy's (w/ Claire Cronin & Advance Base)
June 25 Youngstown, OH @ House Show
June 28 Providence, RI @ AS220 Psychic Readings (w/ Christians and Lions & Lady Queen Paradise)
June 29 Cambridge, MA @ Lilypad (w/ Christians and Lions & Kathy Snax)
June 30 Brooklyn, NY @ Baby's All Right (w/ Advance Base, Matt Bachmann & Claire Cronin) 
Original recording by Patty Loveless

You Can Feel Bad by Moon Racer

Abyss Versions

Unseen Forces and How to Use Them by Boduf Songs

Ruth Garbus- Kleinmeister is out August 30, 2019 on Orindal Records.

LP, CD, DL pre-order: https://orindal.limitedrun.com/products/643557-ruth-garbus-kleinmeister

"I go back to Ruth’s music over and over again. She has the best, weirdest chord changes, the catchiest and most exotic melodies and lyrics, distilled over what I imagine to be many months and years.

"To me her songs reaffirm the power of music itself and its basic elements - big and small intervals placed just so in time, the play of sound and meaning in words, parts put together without force or artifice. Ruth is one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever."  - Chris Cohen

Kleinmeister, the new album by Ruth Garbus, is a rarity, the holy wastewater of folk-rock decanted into the Lake of Avalon by a provincial plebe, turned into wine. It is sublime, and absurd, and infused with the green hills, grey cemeteries, and plastic detritus of her Brattleboro, Vermont home.

These compositions come from an odd but familiar world, chiaroscuro silver litter in the beam of a flashlight. In Garbus’s voice, too, the dark and light are combined - even the highest pitches contain pools of undertones, a depth. (She became fully expressed as a mezzo soprano, in both her range and her soul, with the aid of opera singer Jim Anderson, whom she studied with in 2017/18.)

The first track of Kleinmeister is “Strash,” a sensual ode inspired by the book Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, with unison singing by Julia Tadlock. This is followed by “Pain,” which builds in size and scope toward a kind of operatic emo-political drama, and achieves levitation with piano played by Travis LaPlante (Battle Trance, Subtle Degrees), who also acted as producer, and additional production by Ryan Power, who mixed the album.

From there, Kleinmeister moves into barer bones, highlighting Garbus's resonant voice, rhythmic guitar, and the impeccable recording quality - it was recorded to two-inch tape at Guilford Sound in Guilford, VT by Dave Snyder. Sparse, skewed harmonies, sometimes sung by Tadlock, lilt throughout. The final track, “Fetty Wah,” features LaPlante again, this time on tenor saxophone, with improvised melody lines that uplift but still contain a bit of the sorrow of the world.

Garbus’s prior solo recordings - 2010's Rendezvous with Rama LP and the EP’s Ruthie's Requests, Joule EP, and Hello Everybody - have been released on Burger Records, Autumn Records, Feeding Tube Records, OSR Tapes. Currently, in addition to her solo performances, she improvises vocally with an experimental quintet featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Donny Shaw, Neil Young, and Andy Allen. She was previously in the bands Happy Birthday and Feathers.

Strash by Ruth Garbus

Taken from the 7" Greener or Faster than Now

out December 4, 2012 on Orindal Records

www.orindal.com

Holiday by Julie Byrne

Clairvoyant by Friendship

Album pre-order: https://orindal.limitedrun.com/products/655697-wednesday-i-was-trying-to-describe-you-to-someone

Billboard by Wednesday

The final single from Gia Margaret's forthcoming ambient album, Mia Gargaret (out June 12 on Orindal Records in North America & Dalliance Recordings everywhere else).

https://giamargaret.bandcamp.com/album/mia-gargaret

barely there by Gia Margaret

Pre-order Mia Gargaret by Gia Margaret: http://smarturl.it/miagargaret

Mia Gargaret is an ambient, (mostly) instrumental album by Chicago, IL singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist & producer Gia Margaret.

Mia Gargaret was not the follow-up album that Gia intended to release after the critical success of her 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer. But after she suddenly found herself without use of her primary instrument, she had to rethink her methods, at least temporarily.

Gia explains:

“After having to cancel tours because of illness, I was unable to sing for nearly half of the year. This left me feeling like a shell of myself, so I turned to my synthesizer for comfort. These compositions helped me hold onto my identity as a music maker. At times this music helped soothe my anxiety more than therapy or anything else could.”

Without singing or lyrics to steal the focus, the instrumental tracks on Mia Gargaret shine a light on Gia Margaret’s skills as a musician, composer & producer. Spare but immersive arrangements of synthesizer, piano & acoustic guitar simultaneously ache & soothe, building emotional landscapes that rise & recede like scenery through a train window.

“I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful, which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process. I was making music to self-soothe. I had synth loops going while I walked around my apartment, forming my own daily soundtrack.”

Mia Gargaret documents Gia Margaret’s self-healing. Album opener “apathy” includes an excerpt from her actual vocal therapy exercises. “body” samples a lecture from British philosopher Alan Watts, a continuous source of comfort & perspective for Gia in times of confusion. (Permission to use the sample was personally granted by Mark Watts, son of the late lecturer, in exchange for the use of “body” in his documentary film about his father.) Other tracks feature the sounds of footsteps, church bells, crackling fires, lake waves & other field recordings from Gia’s day-to-day.

“I wanted to capture the feeling of a truly strange time in my life, even though I would prefer to forget it altogether. This process helped me understand something about myself, & hopefully it can help others, too.”

Mia Gargaret ends with “lesson,” the album’s only track to feature Gia’s singing voice. The short song teases at what we can expect from the next Gia Margaret album, a return to more traditional forms of songwriting, due in 2021. In the meantime, Mia Gargaret stands as a gorgeous experiment & a memorable meditation on the healing power of music.

Mia Gargaret was composed, performed & recorded at home by Gia Margaret during the summer & fall of 2019, with guest performances by Emily Cross (clarinet on “ash”), Stephen Steinbrink (vocals, organ & guitar on “lesson”) & There’s Always Glimmer collaborator Doug Saltzman (electronic drum production to on “body” & “lesson”).

body by Gia Margaret

apathy by Gia Margaret

Dear Nora- Three States: Rarities 1997-2007
3LP box set out Sept 18, 2020 on Orindal Records

Orindal

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