Kris Delmhorst’s latest record seems to find her struggling with something like an existential conundrum: to function within the space the world has made, or go about undoing it, even if at one’s own peril.
“How we gonna carry all the things that we know/A pound of feathers or a pound of stones/that shit gets heavier further you go/Can you leave it lying by the side of the road” she asks on “Flower of Forgiveness,” and it seems a fitting encapsulation of the question Long Day in the Milky Way is asking.
▼ Article continues below ▼Luckily for her listeners, this seems somehow to be Delmhorst’s comfort zone: magnifying both the apertures through which we construct and are constructed by the world and the complexities of our behavior — what we do to one another, what we do to ourselves, and what we do with what we are given.
The songs on this record attest to the darkness that’s to be found, but Delmhorst writes with such prodigious insight and earnest seeking that her songs always allow for the maximum passage of light. These songs hold lived experience without nullifying the sanctity of it, without running roughshod over the specificity of it. They capture with such precision the ways in which we are fraught and fragile in the face of the anxiety lurking beneath daily life, yet we are not closed off from the possibility of something like grace.
Delmhorst is here, as ever, at the top of her game, peerless.
Long Day in the Milky Way
Northampton, MA
(CEN/The Orchard)
Produced by Kris Delmhorst // Mixed by Sam Kassirer // Mastered by Alex McCollough
For more info, visit www.krisdelmhorst.com
Soundstripe VP Jay Harren on Music Licensing and the Perks of Royalty Free Tunes
Kanye’s Twitter Blast About Artist Contracts Wasn’t Extreme Enough
4 Insider Tips for Collaborating with Vocalists While Socially Distancing
WILLIE JONES: Fusing Country and Hip-Hop into the Ultimate American Dream
Copyright © Performer Publications, Inc.