JENNIFER CASTLE ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM, CAMELOT, OUT NOVEMBER 1ST, 2024 ON PARADISE OF BACHELORS (WORLDWIDE) AND SOLSTICE RADIO (CANADA)
PRE-SAVE CAMELOT HERE
WATCH / SHARE “LUCKY #8” HERE
BUY / STREAM “LUCKY #8” HERE
Single Cover Artwork for “LUCKY #8” // Photo by Jimmy Limit // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Today, celebrated songwriter Jennifer Castle announces her new album, Camelot, due for release on November 1, 2024 via Paradise of Bachelors and Solstice Radio. The album’s announcement is accompanied by the release of new single “Lucky #8”, an irrepressible ode to dancing as a bulwark against the “tidal pools of pain” and the “theory of collapse.” Co-producer Jeff McMurrich provides the song’s chiming guitars—he plays lead throughout the album—with an assist from special guest Cass McCombs on slide guitar.
The release of “Lucky #8” comes with a tender video Jennifer created using footage of heroic, historic gymnastics routines that were a formative part of her childhood. Now seen through the rearview, these routines take on a new poignance and are embraced differently in Castle’s adulthood. As she gratefully sings in the song’s chorus, ‘so just give the money to the dancers / while their hips go figure eight / and they entrance us with the answers / and we hope and pray the message ain’t too late’.
Jennifer Castle shares that “Lucky #8”, “sort of has that energetic vibe to it, where it attempts a stunt lyrically (in my mind) to absorb all the possibilities of life into one moment and to be okay with that complexity, instead of fracturing off into myriad neurotic narratives.”
With regard to the video, Castle adds, “Questing through the smudged screen to where the inexhaustible competition for greatness twirls. The body is a noble sword, bandaged. But did they win? Sometimes even now that adrenaline takes flight within me. But can I win? And win at what? Lay it on its side, sweet angel. Infinity is victory.”
WATCH / SHARE “LUCKY #8” HERE
BUY / STREAM “LUCKY #8” HERE
“Lucky #8” follows the ravishing country-soul ballad “Blowing Kisses”, which also appears on Camelot, originally released in June following a three and a half year hiatus, along with a video which she created to accompany the single. Featuring a sweeping string arrangement by Owen Pallett, performed by Estonia's FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra, “Blowing Kisses” can be heard in its entirety during the pivotal scene of the penultimate episode of the third season of FX's The Bear. Jennifer discussed the song’s use on the show and the serendipitous backstory involving her longtime friendship with Matty Matheson (Canadian chef and restaurateur who portrays the beloved handyman Neil Fak on the show) and their real-life history working together in a restaurant in this terrific interview for CBC. ”Blowing Kisses” also caught the attention of Rolling Stone, Brooklyn Vegan, Consequence, Esquire and many more upon its release.
WATCH / SHARE “BLOWING KISSES” HERE
BUY / STREAM “BLOWING KISSES” HERE
MORE ABOUT CAMELOT
Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armored knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.
Camelot, Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or its myriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once her most monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike with crisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes, these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions.
‘Back in Camelot’, she sings on the lilting, vulnerable title track, ‘I really learned a lot / circles in the crops and / sky-high geometry’. The album opens with a candid admission of sleeping in the unfinished basement,’ an embarrassing joke that comes true. But the dreamer is redeemed by dreaming, setting sail in her airborne bed above ‘sirens and desert deities’. If she questions her own agency—whether she is ‘wishing stones were standing’ or just ‘pissing in the wind’—it does not diminish the ineffable existential jolt of such signs and wonders.
This abiding tension between belief and doubt, magic and pragmatism, self and other, sacred and profane, and even, arguably, paganism and monotheism, suffuses these ten songs, which limn an interior landscape shot through with sun-striped shadows of “multi-felt dimensions” both mystical and quotidian. The epic scale and transport of “Camelot”, with its swooning strings, gives way dramatically to “Some Friends”, an acoustic-guitar-and-vocals meditation in miniature on Janus-faced friends and the lunar and solar temperatures of their promises—’bright and beaming verses’ versus hot curses—which recalls her minimalist last album, 2020’s achingly intimate Monarch Season. (In a symmetrical sequencing gesture, the penultimate track, the incantatory “Earthsong”, bookends the central six with a similarly spare solo performance and coiled chord progression, this time an ambiguous appeal to … a wounded lover? a wounded saint? our wounded planet?)
PRE-SAVE CAMELOT HERE
Those who “Trust” accuses of treacherous oaths spit through ‘gilded and golden tooth’—cynics, critics, hypocrites, gurus, scientists, doctors, lovers, government, the so-called entertainment industry—sow uncertainty that can infect the artist, as in “Louis”: ‘What’s that dance / and can it be done? What’s that song / and can it be sung?’ Answering affirmatively is “Full Moon in Leo”, which finds the narrator dancing around the house with a broom, wearing nothing but her underwear and “big hair.” But the central question remains: who can we trust, and at what cost faith, in art or angels or otherwise?
Castle’s confidence in her collaborators is the cornerstone of Camelot. Carl Didur (piano and keys), Evan Cartwright (drums and percussion), and steadfast sideman Mike Smith (bass) comprise a rhythm section of exquisite delicacy and depth. This fundamental trio anchors the airiness of regular backing vocalists Victoria Cheong and Isla Craig and frames the guitars of Castle, McMurrich, and Paul Mortimer (and on “Lucky #8,” special guest Cass McCombs). Reprising his decennial role on Castle’s beloved 2014 Pink City, Owen Pallett arranged the strings for Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra.
Pallett’s crowning achievement here is “Blowing Kisses,” on which Castle contemplates time and presence, love and prayer—and how songwriting and poetry both manifest and limit all four dimensions: ‘No words to fumble with / I’m not a beggar to language any longer’. Such rare moments of speechlessness—’I’m so fucking honoured’, Jennifer bluntly proclaims—suggest a state ‘only a god could come up with’. (If Camelot affirms Castle as one of the great song-poets of her generation, she is not immune to the despairing linguistic beggary that plagues all writers.)
Camelot evinces a thoroughgoing faith not only in the natural world—including human bodies, which can, miraculously, dance and swim and bleed and embrace and birth—but also in our interpretations of and interventions in it: the ‘charts and diagrams’ of “Lucky #8”, a daydreamt billboard on Fairfax Ave. in LA in “Full Moon in Leo”, the bloody invocations of the organ-stained “Mary Miracle”, and all manner of water worship, rivers in particular. (Notably, Jennifer has worked as a farmer and a doula.)
The album ends with Castle’s repeated, exalted, insistence that she’s ‘not alone here’ in “Fractal Canyon”. But where is here? The word “utopia” itself constitutes a pun, indicating in its ambiguous first syllable both the Greek “eutopia,” or “good-place”—the facet most remembered today—and “outopia,” or “no-place,” a negative, impossible geography of the mind. Utopia, like its metonym Camelot, is imaginary. Or as fellow Canadian songwriter Neil Young once sang, ‘Everyone knows this is nowhere’.
‘Can you see how I’d be tempted’, Castle asks out of nowhere, held in the mystery, ‘to pretend I’m not alone and let the memory bend?’
TOUR DATES
Sep 12 - Strangewaves, Ferguson Station, Hamilton, ON, Canada with Dorothea Paas
Oct 9 - Baie Verte, Sackville, NB, Canada with Jon Mckeil
Oct 10 - Nowadays Festival, Dartmouth, NS, Canada
Oct 11 - The Cap, Fredericton, NB, Canada with Jon Mckeil
Oct 22 - Folken, Stavanger, Norway
Oct 24 - Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, Sweden
Oct 25 - Pygméteatern Theatre, Stockholm, Sweden
CAMELOT TRACKLISTING
1. Camelot
2. Some Friends
3. Trust
4. Lucky #8
5. Louis
6. Full Moon In Leo
7. Mary Miracle
8. Blowing Kisses
9. Earthsong
10 .Fractal Canyon
PREVIOUS ACCLAIM FOR JENNIFER CASTLE
“Castle reaches a pitch of mystical transport so gorgeously ethereal she seems about to drift off into lands that don’t appear on any map.” – Greil Marcus, The Believer
“Castle’s music is not so much of the earth as floating above it, untethered to the natural order of time and space ... She effortlessly conveys the conflicting emotions
that accompany loss.” – Pitchfork
“No hyperbole, Jennifer Castle is a spectacular songwriter.
Castle’s singing carries the joy of life.” – The FADER
“Castle channels the lunar radiance of Emmylou Harris and the heartfelt barroom blues of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, quietly gleaming with a rustic beauty and a deep, patient understanding
of the mystic.” – Aquarium Drunkard
“Castle’s songs are vibrant and bountiful landscapes, and even in their quietest, darkest moments, they thrum and glow. As a songwriter, Castle has a stunning capacity for crafting lines rich with nuance, humor and devastating beauty.” – CBC
JENNIFER CASTLE ONLINE
WEBSITE
BANDCAMP
INSTAGRAM
TWITTER
FACEBOOK
YOUTUBE