DONOVAN WOODS ANNOUNCES NEW LABEL, SIGNS FIRST ARTIST - CASSIDY MANN

END X MUSIC - THE NEW LABEL FROM DONOVAN WOODS AND MICHELLE SZETO - ANNOUNCES THEIR FIRST SIGNING AND SHARES THE FIRST SINGLE

WATCH AND SHARE CASSIDY MANN’S “ELECTION NIGHT” VISUALIZER HERE

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Photo Credit : Mary Rose // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, Donovan Woods and his long-time manager Michelle Szeto are announcing their new label, End X Music (End Times Music). The Toronto / Nashville based imprint, distributed by The Orchard, is also announcing their first signing, Cassidy Mann, who is releasing her first single with the label, “Election Night”. “Michelle and I were introduced to Cassidy Mann and her songwriting through a songwriting workshop,” says Woods. “I’m so sensitive to word choices and Cassidy’s thrilled me over and over, immediately. Natural songwriters have a ruthless eye for the telling detail and they make you feel, they don’t tell you how to feel. Cassidy’s a natural. Her work came to us as a fully-formed artistic point-of-view. It’s all there, and it’s been a joy to watch it gather steam.”

Szeto adds, “Since Donovan and I started working together over 5 years ago, the idea of sharing what we’ve learned and the relationships we’ve built with another artist has always thrilled us. We never questioned the hard work that would come with it, but rather, we didn’t think we would ever agree on an artist. When we independently came across Cassidy and sent her music to one another, it was a coincidence we couldn’t ignore. Cassidy’s songwriting and production skills are beyond her years, and we’ve been endlessly impressed with her creative instincts.”

Entwining her acoustic roots with gentle electronic textures, Cassidy Mann often reshapes a small moment into a powerful and poetic song that feels both personal and relatable.  “My favorite thing is to write about tiny things that make the bigger picture more important somehow,” she says. 

She wrote “Election Night" by tweaking melodies with producer Roman Clarke (Taylor Janzen, Olivia Lunny) to capture the intense awakening and transformation that many people experienced over the four years of the prior presidency. The lyrics focus on a couple that moved beyond just friends that night but ultimately ended as strangers. 

“Trump’s Presidency was hell for a lot of people and you hear about that a lot, especially from a political standpoint,” says Mann. “I think it’s a really important conversation, but throughout all of it I was also craving the more intimate stories. I wanted to explore the idea of how the whole overarching narrative of that time affected people’s personal relationships.

For me, those four years felt like this kind of general awakening. I was watching people around me change or come into themselves as a direct result of social justice movements. It was becoming really clear what mattered to me when it came to morals, values, and the kind of people I wanted in my life. There was so much intensity during that election, it felt like everyone was reaching out for someone to hold, someone to feel safe beside.”

WATCH AND SHARE CASSIDY MANN’S “ELECTION NIGHT” VISUALIZER HERE

BUY / STREAM “ELECTION NIGHT” HERE

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“Election Night” Single Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

MORE ABOUT CASSIDY MANN
Growing up in the Prairies of Winnipeg, Mann has been singing since she could talk. Her parents bought her a guitar as a birthday present when she was 9. By 14, she started taking songwriting more seriously and her emerging talent led to a nomination for Aboriginal Recording of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards. Watch for more news about Cassidy soon. 

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MORE ABOUT END X MUSIC
The core of End Times’ mission is transparency and adaptability. In the world of streaming, the data is available. Artists should understand their expenses and their earnings as well as anyone they work with. It allows us to interpret and react to how, why, and where songs are being discovered. 

There are many pathways to success, and success looks different to everyone. Every artist and every project is unique and artists should be confident that the team built around them is being created thoughtfully and purposefully in service of their individuality. 

We’ll focus on songwriters, regardless of genre, and work together to make their music valuable by getting it to people who will use it and love it.

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MEGAN NASH ANNOUNCES NEW LP, SHARES VIDEO FOR “CHEW QUIETLY / CLEAN SLATE”

NEW LP, SOFT FOCUS FUTURES, OUT NOVEMBER 3 VIA ACRONYM RECORDS

WATCH AND SHARE “CHEW QUIETLY / CLEAN SLATE” HERE

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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

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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.”

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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

BUY / STREAM / “QUIET” HERE


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

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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

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CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD SHARES BOTTLE ROCKET-INSPIRED VIDEO FOR NEW SINGLE “PARTNER IN CRIME” 

WATCH AND SHARE “PARTNER IN CRIME” HERE

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NEW ALBUM HIGHS IN THE MINUSES OUT OCTOBER 29 VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS

PRE-ORDER HIGHS IN THE MINUSES HERE

NOVEMBER U.S. TOUR DATES NOW ANNOUNCED

“Partner In Crime” video still

Today Charlotte Cornfield shares new single “Partner In Crime” alongside its music video, which is lovingly inspired by Wes Anderson’s 1996 film debut, Bottle Rocket. “In the ‘Partner in Crime’ music video, Charlotte is reunited with an old friend, and the pair embark on a mission to get the old band back together,” explains Joe Cornfield, the video’s director and Charlotte’s brother. “In an homage to Bottle Rocket, Charlotte and her band don yellow jumpsuits and take off in a VW bus to execute a daring musical ‘heist.’” Charlotte adds, “My brother and I grew up watching Wes Anderson movies. They were a huge part of our childhood and adolescence, and I feel like they've seeped into our DNA at this point — the colours, the outfits, the humour. When I sent Joe this song and he came back with this idea, it was a no-brainer that we'd do it. He made it all happen: the van, the jumpsuits, the whole thing. Tara Kannangara, Steven Foster and Sam Gleason came with us on the journey and fully embraced the concept.”

“Partner In Crime” is the second single from Cornfield’s new album Highs in the Minuses, out October 29 via Next Door Records in Canada and Polyvinyl/Double Double Whammy everywhere else. The track follows “Headlines,” a driving song with an earworm chorus that belies the anxiety permeating its lyrics, which earned praise from Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, and The Alternative (“...a catchy chorus that captures the chaotic effect modern life has on so many of our minds”), among others.  

WATCH AND SHARE “PARTNER IN CRIME” HERE

BUY / STREAM “PARTNER IN CRIME” HERE

Cornfield will also head south this fall for a short run of U.S. tour dates, including a November 23rd show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, NY. A current itinerary is below.

Though the songs of Highs in the Minuses are highly personal, Cornfield wanted their sonic quality to convey the communal, aleatoric energy of live performance. With this in mind, she and the band allowed their psychic connection to convey the emotional interconnectedness that comes with stories of heartbreak, self-discovery, and new love. Cornfield (guitar, piano, vocals), bassist Alexandra Levy (Ada Lea) and drummer Liam O’Neill (Suuns) convened in Montreal at the studio of Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen), whom Cornfield had originally met through a musician’s residency he founded at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In just five days, with minimal takes and overdubs—and with contributions from guitarist Sam Gleason (Tim Baker) and Stars singer Amy Millan—they set Cornfield’s vivid mini-memoirs to an earthen folk-rock symphony. 

WATCH AND SHARE “HEADLINES” HERE

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Throughout Highs in the Minuses, it’s tempting to think of Cornfield as a narrator, given the autobiographical nature of many of the songs, but this framing discounts her deep consideration of the listener. She’s not broadcasting absolute truths but rather inviting us to feel alongside her, to acknowledge the raw, shambolic commonality found in individual experiences. Like David Berman and John Prine, Cornfield’s lyrics ring with precision — a rhythmic, poetic clarity that may devastate the heart or tickle the ribs in a simple turn of phrase. 

  

Photo Credit: Angela Lewis // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES


Charlotte Cornfield tour dates:
11/18 - Chicago, IL @ The Hideout
11/22 - Washington, DC @ Pie Shop #
11/23 - Brooklyn, NY @ Baby's All Right #
11/24 - Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA #
# w/ 2nd Grade & The Glow

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HIGHS IN THE MINUSES TRACKLIST
1. Skateboarding By The Lake
2. Headlines
3. Pac-Man
4. 21
5. Black Tattoo
6. Blame Myself
7. Out of the Country
8. Drunk for You
9. Partner in Crime
10. Modern Medicine
11. Destroy Me

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