ELLEN FROESE’ NEW ALBUM, SOLITARY SONGS, OUT TODAY VIA VICTORY POOL RECORDS
WATCH / SHARE “TIDE POOL” HERE
WESTERN CANADIAN TOUR DATES BEGIN JUNE 13
BUY / STREAM SOLITARY SONGS HERE
Photo Credit : Little Jack Films // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Today, Saskatoon songsmith Ellen Froese releases her new album, Solitary Songs, via Victory Pool Records. To mark the occasion, she’s also sharing the new video for album track, “Tide Pool”, an “ode to my cat, a dear friend to me during a turbulent time in my life, whose own life lasted only a year and a bit,” explains Froese. “It's strange how timing works; we got each other through to greener pastures (albeit different kinds), and I wanted to thank him in a song. I love when the band kicks in, and I love the video Stephanie Kuse made. Both make me cry, imagining my little buddy by a babbling brook, chasing butterflies and chewing grass in the sun.”
WATCH / SHARE “TIDE POOL” HERE
MORE ABOUT SOLITARY SONGS
Solitary Songs finds Ellen Froese meditating on a strange chapter of her life. “It’s been a weird year—lots of life changes, maybe some ego-death,” she says. Between an ADHD diagnosis and cutting back on some vices, her perspective—as a musician, a lover, a human being—has changed.
The follow up to 2022’s For Each Flower Growing (produced with the Sheepdogs’ Sam Corbett), Solitary Songs showcases Froese singing songs that sound like dusted-off country classics with wry, down-to-earth lyricism. One moment, Froese is confessing, ‘I’m scared of getting old / But more than that, I’m scared of living without your love’; the next, she’s reeling from a false-start fling, ‘stray cattin’ along’ with a freshly purchased ‘strawberry watermelon turbo-powered vape’. There are no sacred cows in Froese’s world, with blunt humour meeting heartache while the band plays on.
WATCH / SHARE “BELLFLOWER BLUE” HERE
“This record is the outcome of facing non-stop anxiety with songwriting,” Froese says. “I was oscillating back and forth between feeling stuck and feeling like, ‘fuck it, I need to zoom out and have some fun.’” This tension makes Solitary Songs captivating; Froese, chastises herself for overcomplicating things, even if it may be for self-preservation, singing ‘don’t look hard, Ellen’. But she does look hard, turning over the complications—the ex-lover, the rough weather, the lonely hotel bed—meditating on her deeper desires; as her honeyed voice sings, ‘what I seek now is a methodology for peacefulness between my heart and mind’.
Breaking down the role ADHD has played in her life, Froese’s fight against “the damn dopamine hunt” is tracked across Solitary Songs. “If something is intriguing to me, it becomes my entire reality for that time,” Froese explains. Froese excels at self-deprecatingly depicting her own fixations (she muses at one point, ‘I’m thinkin’ and I’m drinkin’ up ways to make you mine’).
LISTEN / SHARE “WINDY WAS THE WEATHER” HERE
LISTEN / SHARE “PRACTICING MY WINK” HERE
Album highlight “Windy Was The Weather” finds Froese tossed and turned by the fickleness of connection. Over bittersweet strums, Froese recalls a tryst with a ‘siren of beauty’. Exhibiting a wisdom far beyond her years, Froese laments the volatility of our bodies and minds, with the caveat that there is some pleasure in the uncertainty of ‘a rose, both thorny and soft on my neck’. Whipping up a gust of strings and horns, this stirring waltz feels as timeless as autumn itself.
WATCH / SHARE “SOLITARY SONG” HERE
LISTEN / SHARE “WONDERING WHEN?” HERE
Friendship is at the heart of Solitary Songs, which sounds like how it was made: a big hangout with friends, trying to make one another smile. Recorded at RecHall studios in Saskatoon, Solitary Songs was created through jubilant, off-the-cuff collaboration, with the band riffing arrangements while Froese penned new verses in the control room.
At this point in her career, with 4 full-length albums and many international tours under her belt, Solitary Songs showcases Froese digging for the feeling of “just making music for the joy of it, like when I was a kid.” And as far as quitting the dopamine rush and finding self-acceptance goes? “I guess the journey up to wellness has peaks and valleys, but it does start to level out,” Froese muses. Indeed, Solitary Songs sees Froese’ flirting with self-acceptance while figuring things out; trying to be “happy in the confidence of a solitary song,” and getting your friends on board for some cheeky country-folk tunes. And nobody does those quite like Ellen Froese.
BUY / STREAM SOLITARY SONGS HERE
TOUR DATES
Jun 13 - Lethbridge, AB - The Owl
Jun 14 - Penticton, BC - The Hub
Jun 17 - Kelowna, BC - DunnEnzies
Jun 18 - Vancouver, BC - The Heatley
Jun 19 - Nanaimo, BC - The Globe Theatre
Jun 25 - Edmonton, AB - The Aviary
Jun 26 - Regina, SK - The Artesian
Jun 27 - Saskatoon, SK - Amigos
SOLITARY SONGS TRACKLIST
01 Solitary Song
02 Wondering When
03 Don’t Look Hard
04 Windy Was The Weather
05 Practicing My Wink
06 Tide Pool
07 Bellflower Blue
08 Closed Game
09 Living Without Your Love
10 Solitary Song (Slow Version)
11 Lucille Mulhall