STARDUST OUT OCTOBER 2 VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS
LISTEN AND SHARE “NEVER GET TIRED (OF LOVING YOU)” HERE
BUY / STREAM “NEVER GET TIRED (OF LOVING YOU)” + PRE-ORDER STARDUST HERE
Photo Credit: Melissa Richards // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Luka Kuplowsky is announcing Stardust, his first full-length release for Next Door Records , with the first single “Never Get Tired (of Loving You)”. While not pining nor sugarcoating, “Never Get Tired (of Loving You)” is a love song, looking at love as an intrinsic component for growth, a solidarity between two people hurtling through the chaotic present. It’s not something light or easy. Rather, this love is, as Luka puts it, “a patient attuning.” Speaking to the single, Kuplowsky says, “Written in an empty apartment shortly after moving in with my partner. A sincere expression of love. A sacred love song attuned to the natural world - thunder, wind, moonlight and a dolphin.
‘Never Get Tired (of Loving You)’ describes love as a form of recognition - a way to see another and ourselves authentically. It is a celebration of difference nurtured and shared. A patient attuning.
One 'never gets tired' because love refreshes the joyful struggle of being - it's that which makes us alive, carry weight and grow.”
LISTEN AND SHARE “NEVER GET TIRED (OF LOVING YOU)” HERE
The first single continues where we left off with Kuplowksy’s Judee Justin Arthur Mary, the reimagined covers EP from earlier this year. With many of the same players as the EP, “Never Get Tired (of Loving You)” features Evan Cartwright (Andy Shauf, U.S. Girls) on drums, Thom Gill (Martha Wainwright, Sam Amidon) on electric guitar and organ, standout jazz player Josh Cole (Josh Cole Quartet, Sandro Perri) on fretless bass, Bahamas’ Felicity Williams (Bahamas) and Robin Dann (Bernice) for backing vocals, and Brodie West (Broken Social Scene, The Ex) on alto sax.
Stardust sees Luka incorporating strings and horns to accompany the jazz-inflected folk sound that he explored on his EP. The album is truly a cinematic exploration of song by Kuplowksy, who works as an adjunct professor of film in Toronto. His narratives often twist and weave through realism and melodrama, romanticism and surrealism. Kuplowsky has an ability to create non-linear narratives that both feel complete and can leave your head spinning with a simple lyric, such as the standout line on the eponymous “Stardust”, where Luka sings, ‘Did I make an angel blush, with my suffering, my loss?’.
Kuplowsky explains his heady vision for the new album, saying:
“In Stardust, the voice is a planet and the band, satellites in orbit.
The songs find their flow in this dance, finding balance not in cohesion but rotation.
Similarly, the lyrics are not necessarily narrative or linear, rather they are spheres of thought and contemplation.
Verses and choruses circle an idea rather than move towards a foregone conclusion.
Let's extend this metaphor further in another direction.
Stardust is indebted to the creativity of Joni Mitchell, Arthur Russell, John Trudell, and Ryan Driver (among
others).
Think of influence not as a mask or screen, but also an ORBIT.
You gotta create your own gravity, or else you're just drifting...
Forever an apprentice in song,
- Luka Kuplowsky”
With his wonderful new album Stardust, Luka Kuplowsky makes a refreshing argument for the relevance of acoustic music as a place to hold thought; an open space to place impeccably chosen words, ideas and images. A young songwriter with a calm, conversational delivery and an effortless, un-showy grasp of poetry; Kuplowsky humbly picks up the same threads of inquiry that did Cohen, asking the big questions about love, meaning and consciousness. Musically, Stardust triangulates between Hejira and Late for the Sky, finding connections between the purity of simple melody and the tangled modulations of jazz. Luka Kuplowsky makes a music of contemplation, a music alive to the everyday possibilities of epiphany and revelation, an unhurried music that moves with the gentle and curving rhythms of thought.
From the first note, Stardust feels fresh and immediate, and this immediacy is no accident. The album was recorded in just two days, in a studio with almost no isolation, with an all-star band of musicians drawn from the rich jazz and improvisational scenes of Toronto. Vocals and nearly everything else was recorded live, in an act of pure trust, and the album truly captures a performance, an assembly of players discovering the songs in real time.
~ written by Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station)
BUY / STREAM “NEVER GET TIRED (OF LOVING YOU)” + PRE-ORDER STARDUST HERE
STARDUST TRACKLIST
1. Do I Have to Be
2. Never Get Tired (of Loving You)
3. Stardust
4. Crazy Love
5. Rough Times
6. City By My Window
7. Positive Push
8. Sayonara Blue
9. Skyline
10. Stardust (Reprise)
11. Be New