NEW LP STARDUST OUT TOMORROW ON NEXT DOOR RECORDS
WATCH AND SHARE “STARDUST (REPRISE)” HERE (CW: NUDITY)
PRE-ORDER STARDUST HERE
Photo Credit: Melissa Richards // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Luka Kuplowsky’s Stardust is out this tomorrow, October 2 via Next Door Records, and ahead of its release, Kuplowsky is sharing the eponymous song along with the arresting visual accompaniment for “Stardust (Reprise)” (CW: fabricated nudity). The final single, delving into death, legacy and the afterlife, along with it’s striking visual component, exemplifies the depth and deliberation that the Canadian songwriter imbues into his songs and every aspect of his craft. The video was produced by Colin Medley, who has worked with the likes of Yves Jarvis, Andy Shauf, U.S. Girls, Alvvays, The Weather Station and more. Kuplowsky has offered a glimpse into the process behind the song and video below:
“I wrote ‘Stardust’ at the end of 2016 reflecting on the passing of Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Prince. The song muses on death and legacy, imagining the artist’s afterlife as cosmic stardust brushed off an angel's shoulder. The song is a key to the record; a musical reference; a space of consolation; a lifting off. It is the record’s guiding light. After attending an exhibition of the artist Evan Penny and his sculpture of the hanging Marsyas, I imagined a video that extended the song’s thoughts on art and legacy through the Greek myth of Apollo and Marsyas.
In Ovid’s account of the Greek myth, Marsyas, a polymath satyr, challenges the god Apollo to a musical contest. Apollo eventually bests his earthly rival by playing his lyre upside down. Having won, Apollo, the god of reason and harmony, flays Marsyas alive, peeling his skin in excessive violence.
For me, the figure of Marsyas indicates the nearness and distance between an artist like Leonard Cohen with a form of spiritual energy, while at the same time emphasizing the pain, suffering and hubris that feeds into their art. Marsyas' peeled skin represents some sort of externalization of the song - a part of the songwriter that peels off and confronts the artist with their distorted reflection of reality.
The video by Colin Medley juxtaposes Marsyas' hanging body with album covers of Leonard Cohen distorted and animated through the "flayed skin" of Penny's "Body Mirror". I also appear singing "Stardust" into my own warped reflection.”
WATCH AND SHARE “STARDUST (REPRISE)” HERE (CW: NUDITY)
Stardust continues where we left off with Kuplowsky’s Judee Justin Arthur Mary, the reimagined covers EP from earlier this year. With many of the same players as the EP – 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”
LISTEN AND SHARE “NEVER GET TIRED (OF LOVING YOU)” HERE
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)
WATCH AND SHARE “CRAZY LOVE” HERE
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