WATCH AND SHARE “ALL TIME RECORD” HERE
AMATEUR HOUR DUE OUT SEPTEMBER 14
PRE-ORDER AMATEUR HOUR HERE
TOUR DATES CONTINUE SEPT 27
“Amateur Hour gleams with thoughtful and crisp writing and explorative musical shifts...” - Exclaim!
PHOTO CREDIT : Dan Haber // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
On the record store shelves this Friday, Chris Velan’s Amateur Hour unfolds like a series of monologues in a one-act play where the characters are locked in a room and forced to respond and react to unexpected news, discovering that what they thought to be true of themselves was in fact not. Exclaim! says that the LP “gleams with thoughtful and crisp writing and explorative musical shifts...”
Today, the acclaimed songwriter is sharing the new video for album track “All Time Record”. Director and stop-motion animator Greg Smith says the video was influenced “as much by Zen Buddhism, Nondualism, the Big Bang and Quantum Spacetime as it was by Le Petit Prince, Rocket Robin Hood, The Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote and Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. The premise was born out test footage I shot some time ago, in which I animated the cosmos using chalk on a blackboard. I knew wanted to do something funny with a touch of science in it, so I pitched Chris an idea about a living planet floating through space." Velan says the result is “a gorgeous, fanciful and profound visual meditation on the song, for which I'm so thankful to Greg.”
WATCH AND SHARE “ALL TIME RECORD” HERE
For his new album, Amateur Hour, Velan began by writing songs about a relationship and all the emotional baggage that comes with it; desire, love, resentment, pain. But soon he realized that the relationship he was exploring was the one with himself.
The album was recorded in a winter week in Velan’s studio with an all-star team of Montreal artists; Bucky Wheaton (Land Of Talk, The Luyas, Timbre Timber), Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson, The Barr Brothers), Michael Feuerstack (Land Of Talk, The Luyas, Bell Orchestre), Max Henry (Suuns), and Tom Mennier (Martha Wainwright). Recorded by Rod Shearer, Amateur Hour is Chris Velan's most accomplished and most personal album yet. The snowy, pastoral setting did nothing to temper what is essentially a pop-rock record with life-giving sounds, sometimes incendiary and explosive.
WATCH AND SHARE “AMATEUR HOUR” LYRIC VIDEO HERE
MORE ABOUT CHRIS VELAN
Chris Velan, has always been crossing borders with his brand of world music-influenced, singer-songwriter pop. Drawing comparisons to the smart, genre-mixing writing of Neil Finn, Nick Lowe, and Paul Simon, Velan has toured throughout North America with festival performances at The Lincoln Center, Sundance Festival, Montreal International Jazz Festival, and Osheaga.
As a producer, he has worked with Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars and Haitian music collective, Lakou Mizik.
Velan’s single, "Un-American Gothic", from his sixth album Glow, was in CBC Radio 2's Top 100 Songs List for 2016.
PRE-ORDER AMATEUR HOUR HERE
AMATEUR HOUR TRACKLIST
01 All Time Record
02 You Can Talk
03 Everything I Have Is Stolen
04 Amateur Hour
05 Cola Wars
06 Only One
07 The Holdout
08 Danger Dreaming
09 Night Caller
10 Black Eye
11 I Was Born To Leave You *
12 You Never Happened *
* bonus track
TOUR DATES
Sep 27 - Wakefield, QC - The Blacksheep Inn
Sep 28 - Toronto, ON - The Burdock
Nov 1 - Montreal, QC - Petit Campus
Nov 2 - Frelighsburg, QC - Beat & Betterave