New Releases
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June 25, 2021Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part is an album of songs written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. With Shaw on vocals and Sō filling out this new band, they developed songs in the studio, with lyrics inspired by their own wide-ranging interests: James Joyce, the Sacred Harp hymnal, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible’s Book of Ruth, the American roots tune “I’ll Fly Away,” the pop music of ABBA, and more. Pre-order to download “To the Sky” now and get a custom climbing pole bean seed packet hand-printed and signed by Shaw.
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Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part is an album of songs written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. With Shaw on vocals and Sō filling out this new band, they developed songs in the studio, with lyrics inspired by their own wide-ranging interests: James Joyce, the Sacred Harp hymnal, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible’s Book of Ruth, the American roots tune “I’ll Fly Away,” the pop music of ABBA, and more. Pre-order to download “To the Sky” now and get a custom climbing pole bean seed packet hand-printed and signed by Shaw.
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Chris Thile’s Laysongs is his first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, Laysongs features the three-part “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters; a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a selection from Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; and a Hazel Dickens cover. Nonesuch Store pre-orders include a print of the album cover image autographed by Thile.
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k.d. lang’s makeover is a new collection of classic remixes of some of her best-loved songs. The album brings these remixes, made between 1992 and 2000, together for the first time, and includes “Sexuality,” “Miss Chatelaine,” “Theme from The Valley of the Dolls,” “Summerfling,” and the #1 dance chart hits “Lifted By Love” and “If I Were You.” makeover’s cover art features a previously unseen 1995 portrait of lang by David LaChapelle. Pre-order to download “Miss Chatelaine (St. Tropez Mix)" now and get an exclusive, limited-edition print of the album cover signed by lang and a paper doll PDF set to print at home featuring iconic looks from throughout her career.
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Rhiannon Giddens' album They’re Calling Me Home was recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi during the COVID-19 lockdown in Ireland. The two expats found themselves drawn to and comforted by the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland, which they recorded at a spare studio on a working farm outside of Dublin. The result is a twelve-song album that speaks to the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical call "home" of death. Vinyl is due June 11.
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Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut album, Big Science, returns to vinyl for the first time in thirty years with this new red vinyl edition, which includes the original album re-mastered for a 25th anniversary CD release in 2007. Big Science foresaw the future, mixing performance art, pop, and electronics, most hauntingly on the hit single, "O Superman." "It's worth considering how readily Big Science stands alone, untethered from time and place," says Uncut. "And how, over the course of its near-40-year existence, it has been a record that has come to acquire new resonance with each generation, now standing as one of the most influential albums of the past four decades."
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Lake Street Dive's album Obviously was produced by Grammy Award winner Mike Elizondo, a songwriting collaborator for Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent and record producer for Fiona Apple and Mary J. Blige, among others. "Mike encouraged us to make bolder arrangement choices, take those chances and try those things," says bassist Bridget Kearney. "The record really is a success in what we set out to do: continue to challenge ourselves, continue to grow, and do things we’ve never done before." "You need to make this band part of your life," exclaims the AP. "Lake Street Dive have never sounded better, full and clear with every instrument given a chance to shine in every song."
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This world premiere performance of Louis Andriessen’s The only one by the Los Angeles Philharmonic was recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall in May 2019, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with solo vocalist Nora Fischer. Two artistic discoveries influenced Andriessen as he wrote the piece: a collection of poems by the Flemish poet Delphine Lecompte from The animals in me, and the work of Nora Fischer, an Amsterdam–based singer known for developing dynamic creative projects that fuse classical and pop music. “Andriessen used bits of old music, an allusion to the Dies Irae motif and some Minimalism, a jazz riff here and a Mexican brass allusion there, as he often has," says the Los Angeles Times. "But he always remakes it into a complex and powerfully blatant new thing, and here edge-of-your-seat operatically so."
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To mark the 20th anniversary of Emmylou Harris's Nonesuch debut album, Red Dirt Girl, comes this limited-edition, translucent red 2-LP vinyl version. Harris wrote all but one of the tracks on Red Dirt Girl, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. It was produced by Malcolm Burn, who also performs on the album, along with Buddy Miller, Daryl Johnson, and Ethan Johns. Dave Matthews sings a duet with Harris, and Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, and Patty Griffin also contribute vocals.