Album Notes

Kris Delmhorst's arresting new album Shotgun Singer began as an act of solitary creation. Holed up in a rural cabin with minimal recording gear and a houseful of instruments, Delmhorst recorded her new songs alone and off the clock, in late night sessions that yielded layers of intimate vocals combined with nylon string and electric guitars, cellos, keyboards, and percussion. She treated the work like oil painting, allowing the canvas to breathe and change over the course of many months until the picture emerged. With the core of each song patiently assembled, she brought in a diverse cast of players to add sparse backing lines of drums, keys, guitar, and vinyl-based samples, and enlisted co-producer Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter) in arrangement and mixing, coaxing him meanwhile to play keyboards and percussion on several songs. The result is collection of songs fully realized and even lush at times, but retaining a hushed intensity, a spirit of lo-fi intimacy and unhurried exploration.

With a back catalog that includes two darkly rollicking roots records produced by Morphine’s Billy Conway (2001’s Five Stories, and 2003’s Songs for a Hurricane), and the 2006 release Strange Conversation, a vibrant collection of Americana songs inspired by the work of famous poets (“a remarkable album...as seamless and brave as it is brilliantly creative” - Irish Times), Kris Delmhorst has built a thriving career and a devoted following from the ground up, and without major label hype. The same independence of spirit that led Delmhorst to spend some early years working on subsistence farms, cooking on a schooner off the coast of Maine, or hitch-hiking the back roads of Ireland with a fiddle on her back, is evident in the arc of her musical evolution: a willingness to work on her own terms and her own time. Along the way she’s parlayed a decade of successful cross country and trans-Atlantic touring into one of the most distinct voices in American music.

With Shotgun Singer, Delmhorst has trained that voice on a series of gracefully open lyrics and figures that transcend genre, ranging into the borderlands between indie-rock and folk, that nameless territory inhabited by such hard-to-classify artists as Juana Molina, Feist, Iron & Wine, and Laura Veirs. Adventurous, elegant, lucid, and haunting, the record is the work of a musician at full stride who has found a musical language equal to her vision.