PERFORMING IN VANCOUVER NOV 26 & VICTORIA DECEMBER 10
WATCH / SHARE “BROTHERS IN ARMS” HERE
GLOSSOLALIA OUT NOW
BUY / STREAM GLOSSOLALIA HERE
“quietly contemplative meditations on finding your place in the world” - Exclaim!
“Insightful and vulnerable in equal measure” - The Line Of Best Fit
With peaceful acoustic guitar, enchanting strings, and graceful harmonies, the album skillfully balances intrigue and simplicity as it weaves through each song.” Cups N Cakes
“Brothers In Arms” Video Still
Today, songwriter Jordan Klassen is announce two upcoming performances in Victoria and Vancouver, and is sharing the new video for “Brothers In Arms” from his latest LP, Glossolalia. Full performance dates and tickets can be found below.
Director Matt Kingcroft says, “for me, 'Brothers In Arms' is about a kind of radical forgiveness, and explores the stories we tell ourselves that make reconciliation harder. Inspired by the parable of the prodigal son, as well as real stories from real families, the video asks: what would it take for forgiveness to enter the fractured narrative we've all unwittingly found ourselves in? How can we free ourselves from the roles we unconsciously perform, whether online or at the dinner table? How do we build a new story?”
WATCH / SHARE “BROTHERS IN ARMS” HERE
MORE ABOUT GLOSSOLALIA
Glossolalia is classic and essential Jordan Klassen: ethereal, dreamy, mystical, and reminiscent of times gone by and the folk singers of yore. This album is a lyrical essay, with each song like a chapter in a personal journal. ‘Glossolalia’ itself is the phenomenon of (apparently) speaking in an unknown language, more commonly called ‘speaking in tongues’.
The album is almost elegiac, with its pervasive sense of something that has been lost to the past. Perhaps it was inevitable that Klassen would produce this record now, reflecting on the promise we have all felt of something better just on the horizon, that has since been erased by life in a pandemic that has entered its third year. In Klassen’s own words on this record, “Everything is about longing - longing for change but trying to be realistic about change as well.”
WATCH / SHARE “LOTUSLAND” HERE
WATCH / SHARE “MILK AND HONEY” HERE
Record opener “Lotusland” is an ode to Klassen’s hometown of Vancouver, but specifically, the Vancouver of yesteryears, before the city grew to become an overinflated and vastly different landscape of what it used to be; a former shell of itself, where the weight of the cost of living seemingly crushes its oldest inhabitants. As friends move away, the singer asks the city to convince him to stay, and laments what ‘West Coast living’ could have meant. Similarly, Klassen stays in that uncomfortable place of yearning in “Hard On Myself”. The song deals with the choice to take the road through life that represents the “third way”, in a world that is polarized and binary. This is a conscious movement away from religious rigidity, absolute certainty, and toxic black and white thinking. But the other road, “the road less traveled”, to quote Robert Frost, is one of strangeness and deconstruction, and there is a sadness in this choice as well. In a contemporary take on a poetic classic, Klassen sings: “There are two roads where I’m standing, and each one has called itself good. But there’s light in the sky and I’ve got some supplies; I just might make my way through the woods.” Frost ruminated, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
WATCH / SHARE “ASH WEDNESDAY” HERE
WATCH / SHARE “CARRIED AWAY” LYRIC VIDEO
The back half of Glossolalia flips from an observational standpoint, to a more personal, introspective one. “Brothers In Arms” is a personal reflection on the need for reconciliation, with painful rifts in society and within families and friends’ groups, heightened by vaccine anxiety, isolation, restrictions, quarantine, and lockdowns. We are reminded that we are still “Living our days as brothers in arms”, regardless of what goes on around us in a pandemic world. It is a mature, reserved commentary from Klassen that none of us has the residue of innocence anymore: “Oh you aren’t some little boy who needs the world explained”. “Pangea” draws parallels between Klassen’s personal love of history and a past when the world was truly one in a great continental mass. The artist, who can be seen as a kind of Renaissance man himself, takes up the defense of great movements and thoughts of the past, and declares, “I’m caught up in stories from before”.
BUY / STREAM GLOSSOLALIA HERE
PERFORMANCE DATES
Nov 26 - Vancouver BC - The Historic Cultch Theatre (TICKETS)
Dec 10 - Victoria BC - Capital Ballroom (TICKETS)
Photo Credit : Rachel Pick // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
