NEW LP, STARDUST, COMING ON NEXT DOOR RECORDS OCTOBER 2, 2020
WATCH AND SHARE “POSITIVE PUSH” HERE
PRE-ORDER STARDUST HERE
Photo Credit: Melissa Richards // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Luka Kuplowsky announced Stardust, his first full-length release for Next Door Records, last month and is returning today with the video for “Positive Push”, a compelling shift from the folk-oriented first single “Never Get Tired (of Loving You)”. The new single is dominated by a driving bass line with synth flourishes that, together, are reminiscent of Stereolab’s early work. The contrast of these songs perfectly encapsulates what makes Luka Kuplowsky such an exciting musical voice. His vision, and that of his collaborators, including members of U.S. Girls, Andy Shauf, Bahamas, Julia Jacklin and more, is never limited to genre.
“Positive Push” is “grasping at something elusive,” says Luka. “The voice of the song is overwhelmed with questions - seeking answers in teachers, family, love. Exhausted and uncertain, the song arrives at the recognition that the voice itself is the vehicle for change and actualization. ‘Sing Sing Sing like a Singer Songwriter / I hope to die a lot lighter than this’.
In recording the vocals live with the band, I often sat hunched on a stool strumming my classical guitar. For this song I put down the guitar and was dancing round the vocal booth. I wanted to get wacky and pop in a deadly serious way. I was listening a lot to The Roches 1989 masterpiece Speak.”
WATCH AND SHARE “POSITIVE PUSH” HERE
Speaking to the music video, directed by his brother Adam Kuplowsky, Luka writes, “J.J. The Clown inspired this video. My mama found J.J. at a roadside antique store outside Toronto. ‘He could star in one of your movies,’ she said to my brothers and I. A week later, we had him dancing atop the St. Lawrence River to the groove of ‘Positive Push’. Surely, there is no symbol for the artist more enduring than that of ‘the dancing clown.’”
While not pining nor sugar coating Kuplowsky’s first single off of Stardust, “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.” Gold Flake Paint called it “a tender, almost opulent display… a swirling mix of jazz and folk, a Destroyer-esque melding of glorious vocals and glowing instrumentation that creates its own book of superlatives.”
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)
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