NEW LP, SOFT FOCUS FUTURES, OUT NOVEMBER 3 VIA ACRONYM RECORDS
WATCH AND SHARE “CHEW QUIETLY / CLEAN SLATE” HERE
BUY / STREAM “CHEW QUIETLY / CLEAN SLATE” HERE
FALL TOUR DATES NOW ANNOUNCED
Photo Credit : Gina Brass // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Today, Megan Nash is announcing the release of their upcoming LP, Soft Focus Futures, out November 3 via Acronym. The announcement arrives with a new video for album track “Chew Quietly / Clean Slate”, a song about “anxiety and hope and dating after a divorce and just wanting things to work out this time,” says Nash. “It's about longing for intimacy and stability. It's about that twist in the gut when you see your crush. It's about feeling unbelievably awkward. It's about trying again.”
The video for “Chew Quietly / Clean Slate”, which premiered yesterday as part of a fundraiser for Moose Jaw Pride, was a bucket list project for Nash. “I have always wanted to do a one take video and hey, why not for a five minute long song that has a noise section? The team involved was supportive but we had our challenges.
My first meeting with Misty Wensel, the choreographer, was during an 11 hour power outage in January. I was on the phone with her while wearing multiple layers and cuddling with my dog in bed for warmth. Through sending me videos, I was able to get a general grasp of the movements that I planned on performing indoors. For months this is how we had to work due to a travel advisory. Covid-19 made it impossible for me to get to Regina so the project kept getting pushed back. Due to Covid, we decided to move the project outside to the Conexus Arts Centre. Our first rehearsal had to be cancelled due to a flood. Our next rehearsal had to be early in the morning due to the heat dome. When this project could finally happen, it fell into place, months after we had initially imagined.”
To donate to Moose Jaw Pride, visit : https://moosejawpride.ca/donate/
WATCH AND SHARE “CHEW QUIETLY / CLEAN SLATE” HERE
BUY / STREAM “CHEW QUIETLY / CLEAN SLATE” HERE
MORE ABOUT SOFT FOCUS FUTURES
Throughout their self-produced sophomore album Soft Focus Futures, Megan Nash mines the death of her marriage for clues that could decode its demise and set her on a path toward some sort of stability in self. In the process, they achieve a distillation of heartache and its attendant, all-consuming power that arrives like a 100-year flood in blossoming crescendos buoyed by precise poetry evoking unnatural disasters, the tyranny of silence, old dogs, and the isolation of life in the country. The blue hues, unsteady triumph, and emotional grandeur of Soft Focus Futures earns a spiritual kinship with author Elizabeth Smart’s masterpiece, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, about Smart’s affair with George Barker. “The water submerges and blends, but I am not dead,” Smart writes about grief and love. “O I am not dead. I am under the sea. The entire sea is on top of me.”
WATCH AND SHARE “MY OWN HEART” LYRIC VIDEO
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After “Table For One” sets a scene of quiet devastation with a sparse acoustic guitar strum, the slow-building tidal wave of “Artifact” reveals the loneliness of separation’s aftermath: ‘Our love is an island where we used to live,’ Nash sings over the song’s dreamy wash. ‘It was swallowed by the ocean.’ With “My Own Heart”, she seeks a cosmos-sized space in which she’s able to learn to be alone with herself; the more grounded, guitar-fuelled “Coffee” hammers home the less desirable realities of that isolation, like bad dates and the fear that that accompanies being on your own in a creaky old house. With incisive, earthy verse, Nash invokes the particularities of their Prairie home, parsing through childhood memories of her family’s small farm and searching for her place in that lineage with “Another Silent Night”, while using the vernacular of small-town gossip to paint a lonesome rural scene on “Are We Still In Love?” The sonic scope of “Chew Quietly/Clean Slate” looms vast over anxieties about meeting someone new, deploying epic, frenzied breakdowns to communicate inner turmoil. As the curtain closes, Nash is careful to avoid claiming resolution or closure—the nature of those concepts are fickle at best—and instead chooses to let her heart beat out ‘the poisonous rhythm of the truth.’ But the silence lingering in the exhales intertwined at the end of “Table For One (Reprise)” begins to, maybe, carve out space once again for a great flood of love.
WATCH AND SHARE “QUIET” HERE
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Soft Focus Futures is set to be released on what would’ve been the fourth anniversary of her wedding — November 3, 2021. To build the album’s lush soundscapes, Nash turned to their long-time musical co-conspirators the Best of Intentions, composed of talented multi-instrumentalists Dana Rempel, Darnell Stewart, and Tanner Wilhelm Hale. Additional contributions feature Brady Frank, Dalton Lam, Digawolf, Stacy Tinant, Jenna Nash, Logan Amon, and Megan’s wizened dog Shiloh, to whom she dedicates a poem in the liner notes of the album. Soft Focus Futures was officially engineered by Dana Rempel, but in most cases, because of pandemic restrictions, each contributing player individually recorded their own parts in a collective act of camaraderie that testifies to the closeness of those involved and their faith in the quality of Nash’s work. Despite the distance, Soft Focus Futures is a cohesive creation that sounds as though it was made in the presence of dear friends so close they could breathe on one another. The album was mixed and mastered by Justin Bender at Divergent Sounds Studio.
WATCH/SHARE “ARTIFACT” HERE
BUY / STREAM “ARTIFACT” HERE
Nash, who is a gender-fluid, non-binary woman—and unabashed Scorpio—uses both she and they pronouns and lives on Treaty 4 Territory. They’ve won and been nominated for numerous awards, including a 2019 JUNO Award nomination for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year for Seeker and a 2021 Best of Moose Jaw Award for Best Musical Artist. The recognition back home is in no small part due to her long and winding history of hitting the road, where she’s done international showcases in the United States, the UK, Germany, and Estonia on top of countless gigs in Canada’s small towns and sprawling metropolises. With everyone’s health top of mind on the touring schedule to come, rest assured you’ll be able to see them—and hear Soft Focus Futures live—the minute she’s able to safely hit your town.
In the meantime fans in Saskatchewan can catch Megan performing on the dates below.
October 29th - Swift Current, Saskatchewan - The Lyric Theatre - Tickets
November 26th - Regina, Saskatchewan - The Exchange
November 27th - Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - Amigos
SOFT FOCUS FUTURES TRACKLIST
01 Table For One
02 Artifact
03 Quiet
04 My Own Heart
05 Coffee
06 Another Silent Night
07 Chew Quietly / Clean Slate
08 Room 804
09 Are We Still In Love
10 Table For One Reprise