EDWIN RAPHAEL ANNOUNCES NEW LP, WARM TERRACOTTA, SHARES NEW SINGLE

Photo Credit: André Rainville //  DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

How do you anchor yourself when occupying multiple geographic identities at once? For Edwin Raphael, the Dubai-born, Montreal-based songwriter, it requires an intentional and intensive form of world-building. By developing an unmistakable style of folk that merges Eastern scales with the Western pop canon, Raphael reimagines his music as a exploratory tool that allows him to construct an interior and sacred home to retreat into. 

Where his past projects found inspiration in the metaphorical potential of water, his forthcoming album Warm Terracotta walks deeper into the island after standing on the shore. On Edwin Raphael’s most intimate and ambitious project to date, he grapples with the realization of being a foreigner everywhere; of longing to know your ancestral roots, while also honouring the home you’ve built for yourself. Both spacious and pulsating, the album is inspired by Indian classical music, experimental psychedelic folk, and spacey 80s pop; at times, conjuring the lower-jaw tingle of grass between your toes, or the sun-soaked splendour of late afternoon ragas. In Raphael’s own words, the album is an antidote: “one that swallows you into forgetting your present troubles, while also painting a world you can escape into — and keep coming back to.” 

Last year, Raphael shared album track “Tripping Through My Blood”, and today he returns with "Under Weather”, a song that “represents the relationship one has with time, the constant balancing as a slow dance that one tries to weave," says Raphael. “Becoming a pathetic fallacy, time becomes a force of nature that pushes us to engrave our memories, picking specific moments as we adapt and evolve. To push beyond an inner monologue that's constantly in battle and to prioritise the smaller things."

For the visualizer, Raphael says “Creative Director Jonathan Frydmanand I had the privilege to find ourselves at the base of the Rockies in Alberta where the landscapes were quite stunning and at the peak of change. We tied drone shots and handheld footage with AI artist, Kier Spilsbury, to prompt a very trippy transitional result. It all ties in as a surreal forest walk to catalyse your inner thoughts.”

WATCH / SHARE “UNDER WEATHER” HERE FT. ELENI DRAKE
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MORE ABOUT EDWIN RAPHAEL
Growing up in Dubai, as the son of parents who immigrated from the city of Cochin in India’s coastal Kerala state, Raphael studied classical guitar before deciding on the keys. As he developed an affinity for John Mayer and Ben Howard, he felt at odds with Dubai’s distinct sense of “placelessness” — and the bewildering feeling of being immersed in a culture where everyone claimed an alternate homeland. It wasn’t until he moved to Montreal to pursue a business degree that he felt a sense of stability, and became deeply entangled with the city’s indie bedroom pop scene.

WATCH / SHARE “TRIPPING THROUGH MY BLOOD” HERE
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His debut EP Ocean’s Walk (2015) paired stirring, melancholic instrumentals with a fierce self-reckoning. It would set the stage for a string of releases that would dive deeper into the psyche; like confronting the aftershocks following a significant heartbreak, or relearning your emotional baseline as you mature. Subsequent releases, Cold Nights (2017), his acclaimed debut Will You Think of Me Later? (2019), and its follow up Staring at Ceilings (2021), reveal an artist devoted to sharpening his ability to translate his experiences into ubiquitous statements, and saw him open for Hollow Coves, JP Saxe, Noah Kahan. 

PRE-SAVE WARM TERRACOTTA HERE
PRE-ORDER WARM TERRACOTTA VINYL HERE

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WARM TERRACOTTA TRACK LIST
01 - Desire Paths~
02 - & She Drinks Tea Just For The Company
03 - Have You Been Told?
04 - Under Weather (feat. Eleni Drake)
05 - Contours Of Spring
06 - Sights Like These
07 - Hate It When You See Me Like This!
08 - Tripping Through My Blood
09 - Deceive Me So Easy
10 - Tea Break~
11 - Bazaar Days
12 - Purple Inside
13 - Homesick For The Place I Don’t Even Know (feat. Sam Valdez)
14 - Sirimiri

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DOUG PAISLEY SHARES NEW SINGLE / VIDEO, “SOMETIMES IT’S SO EASY”

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DOUG PAISLEY’S NEW LP, SAY WHAT YOU LIKE, PRODUCED BY AFIE JURVANEN, SET FOR RELEASE MARCH 17, 2023 VIA OUTSIDE MUSIC

PRE-SAVE SAY WHAT YOU LIKE HERE

“Produced by Bahamas' Afie Jurvanen, Say What You Like's 11 songs were distilled from more than 250 unrecorded tracks written by Paisley over the last decade. Folding folk, country and pop sensibilities into Paisley's sterling writing, it's another showcase of the songwriter's carefully wrought universe.” EXCLAIM! (Most Anticipated Canadian Albums ‘23)

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Late last year, Doug Paisley announced his upcoming album, Say What You Like, and shared the title track from the record. Today, he returns with another track from the LP, “Sometimes It’s So Easy”, complete with a video from director Colin Medley.

“This is a song for the leaving kind and the left behind, at the moment when one can seem so cold and cruel and the other so wounded,” says Paisley. “In the end, to right themselves, the price they pay in their own time is about equal. It makes me think of Bob Marley's ‘Running Away’ although this song is less sure of having taken its own advice. I'm inspired by the intricacy in simple folk and country songwriting where a little irony can suspend a point or an idea without bringing it down too hard in any one place, like an X-wing in a dogfight. For that reason I hope I haven't said very much here but if you're in a situation where there's blame and hurt then you know you still have a way to go, if you were fortunate enough to be there at all.”

Of the video, Paisley says “this is the first time I've made a music video for one of my songs. I risked my body and my 1950 Gibson guitar for the stunt and in hindsight I guess it lines up with some of the recklessness in the song itself.”

Director Colin Medley adds that “Doug told me that when he was a teenager he once biked from Mount Pleasant Cemetery all the way to the waterfront with no hands. I'm not sure I fully believed him, but when we showed up on the Toronto Islands to film this video, not only could he still effortlessly bike without touching his handlebars, he could do so while singing and playing guitar for take after take. It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.”

WATCH / SHARE “SOMETIMES IT’S SO EASY” HERE
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MORE ABOUT DOUG PAISLEY
Since the release of his self-titled debut fifteen years ago, Doug Paisley has earned accolades for unflinchingly self-reflective songs delivered with simplicity and beauty. Though Paisley has always collaborated with topnotch Canadian musicians including luminaries like Garth Hudson, Leslie Feist, and Mary Margaret O’Hara, his records have drawn poignancy also from moments where the listener hears Paisley as he most often hears himself: unadorned and alone with his guitar. The critical response to Paisley’s sophomore release, Constant Companion, underlined this quality. MOJO, naming the album one of the top ten of 2010, found in its “rare kind of purity” evidence that “an anti-star is born”. While Rolling Stone deemed it to be a “nearly perfect singer-songwriter record”, UNCUT described it as “sure-footed and ageless… uncluttered, sad and unerringly lovely.” The “quiet and contemplative” nature of Paisley’s last record, Starter Home, continued this trend, earning it a place in The New Yorker’s top ten albums of 2018.   

WATCH / SHARE “SAY WHAT YOU LIKE” HERE
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  MORE ABOUT SAY WHAT YOU LIKE
Distilled from more than 250 unrecorded songs penned by Paisley over the last decade, the eleven tracks selected by Afie Jurvanen combine folk, country, and pop sensibilities to showcase Paisley’s rich sense of melody and remarkable way with words. The final product is Paisley at his best – honest, exposed, searching – and yet comforting in his ability to communicate the universal in the struggles of the individual. In meditations on the disappointments and shortcomings of love, Paisley looks hard at middle age, and facing the time ‘when looking young is getting old.’ ‘We’re always somewhere in-between forever and walking away / we’ll spend a lifetime, you and me, day by day.’ One cannot help but get the sense from these songs that Paisley simply must write – it's about emotional survival and the process of working through. “As a songwriter these days,” Paisley reflected earlier this year, “there’s very little to gain and very little to lose so I am working only from the heart, there’s no other motive.” It shows. 

PRE-SAVE SAY WHAT YOU LIKE HERE

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SAY WHAT YOU LIKE TRACKLIST
01 Say What You Like
02 Sometimes It’s So Easy
03 Wide Open Plain
04 Rewrite History
05 Almost
06 If I Wanted To
07 I Wanted It Too Much
08 Make It A Double
09 You Turn My Life Around
10 Holy Roller
11 Old Hometown

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GABRIELLE SHONK ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM, ACROSS THE ROOM, SHARES “PEOPLE PLEASER”

ACROSS THE ROOM, OUT FEBRUARY 24, 2023 VIA ARTS & CRAFTS

WATCH / SHARE “PEOPLE PLEASER” HERE
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PRE-SAVE ACROSS THE ROOM HERE

TOUR DATES WITH CHARLIE WINSTON AND THE BARR BROTHERS BEGIN JANUARY 2023. FULL TOUR DATES FOUND BELOW

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How do you come back to yourself? First, it’s important to understand you have become lost, and admit you’ve veered off path. How then do you begin to piece yourself back together? This is the journey Gabrielle Shonk, the JUNO Award-nominated singer and songwriter, takes us on with her sophomore album, Across The Room, set for release February 24, 2023. 

The eleven-track record chronicles the big and small feelings of heartache, and the hope that comes with endings and new beginnings. This excavation of self and purpose seemed to be a long time coming. “It's not always the easiest to look inward. But, when it is easy, you hold on to all those small victories— finding a sense of wholeness within yourself,” says Shonk. 

Today, Shonk is sharing another new track from the album, “People Pleaser”, a track about being sick and tired of being a ‘People Pleaser’ and wanting to move forward and on from it.”

WATCH / SHARE “PEOPLE PLEASER” HERE
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MORE ABOUT ACROSS THE ROOM
Searching for a sense of wholeness has been central to Shonk’s path in the five years since her self-titled debut album. Conversations about a sophomore record began not long after the success of her debut, with her former major label asking to see and hear new material. Shonk recalls succumbing to a self-critical, internal pressure during that time for what that next album would be; a creative blockage that made her unsure of what she wanted to say at all. 

Some songs on Across The Room are a few years old. They began as stowed away writing projects in green rooms; whatever downtime she had during a busy touring schedule, Shonk and frequent collaborator and co-writer Jessy Caron (Men I Trust) worked on new material together. Out of those sessions emerged “Reminds Me of You”, a wistful, sombre song emanating a familiar feeling of grief when everything reminds you of the love you’ve lost. The coalescence of the track was natural, and Shonk started to feel renewed confidence.

Over 2018 to 2019, Shonk brought some songs to Jesse Mac Cormack, whom Shonk calls a “musical genius,” even doing a bit of pre-production and writing in the studio. Mac Cormack co-composed “Remember to Breathe”, a self-soothing song Shonk wrote as a reminder to herself while dealing with anxiety to come back to the essentialness of breath. Encouraged by the creative output during this period with her long-time collaborators, Shonk brought these tracks to her former label. She was met with a tepid response, asking for different material. Her creative disposition began to cool and put her back on a track of uncertainty. 

It was in the early days of the pandemic that Shonk found she could piece together a new creative and artistic direction more authentic to her. Tucked herself away in her apartment in Quebec City, her hometown, she rediscovered her love of listening to and making music, something she says she had been disconnected from in the grind of working as a professional musician. In this place of safety and comfort (Shonk even converted her parent's garage into a practice space), she re-learned and re-embraced melodies she loved in her youth. Some records and musicians Shonk fondly fell back into include: George Harrison, The Beatles, Al Green, Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker. 

Shonk felt called to sit down and practice more than before, noting her guitar skills improved, helping with other creative aspects that now ripple throughout Across The Room. “Creating without boundaries, or expectations, and just for the fun of it was what my process had been missing. I felt set free,” she says. 

Her internal work started to deepen. “Coming home and coming back to myself, I thought, ‘what do I want to sound like? What resonates with me right now? Where's this going?’ I kept going back to those questions and that's where things became clear to me.” 

At the end of 2021, with this new body of work formed during her creative seclusion, Shonk and her label decided it was best to amicably part ways, and she brought the songs that formed Across The Room to Arts & Crafts. 

WATCH / SHARE / BUY / STREAM “AFTERTASTE” HERE

This delicate, brimming sophomore offering, now free of past constraints, could be made with the rich sounds and verses from her closest collaborators and best friends. “I made this whole album with people who are really close and dear to me,” she says. “Why go look anywhere else when all these amazingly talented people are my friends and with whom I actually enjoy spending my time? I wanted the process to be fun, personal, and authentic—so I worked with the people who know me best.” 

Across The Room was recorded during the first half of 2022, splitting production time around rural Quebec and Montreal with Mac Cormack. Shonk brought herself fully into view. “I found my creative groove. I felt so much more grounded, independent and confident in my own capacities as an artist, musician, and songwriter, and stopped blocking and judging my creative flow, which gave me my best work yet,” she says. 

This album prods at some of the deepest fears, insecurities, and questions a person can have about themself, like on “People Pleaser”, a song grappling with what happens when you place other people’s needs above your own, and “5 A.M.”, a smooth, jazz-inflected track putting Shonk back into the moment of seeing someone from her past for the first time again, something that reverberates in recognition a thousand times over if you’ve ever been so lucky to love hard and feel it even harder when it ends. “How We Used To Be”, moody and with sonic textures of 90s R&B, picks up more romantic nostalgia by reminiscing about what a relationship was like before it fell apart. On “Aftertaste”, Shonk ponders over animated synths her relationship to partying as a way to cope with the pressures of life. The closing track, “Quand le calme reviendra”, written during a storm on a writing retreat in Gaspésie, Quebec, questions what will happen after all that we have learned and endured during these unsettling years.

WATCH / SHARE “HOW WE USED TO BE” HERE
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Every track on Across The Room began as a feeling. Each was the seed of something Shonk noted down and stashed away for later, once she had felt what she needed and could reasonably tackle such subject matter later on. Because the process of moving on begins with coming to terms with a feeling before understanding what really happened. Clarity always comes later.

And that’s the throughline of this sublime sophomore offering. Across The Room, a deeply personal and lucid record, is the result of years of feeling, thinking, and breathing life back into a creative spirit.

PRE-SAVE ACROSS THE ROOM HERE

PRAISE FOR GABRIELLE SHONK

"her gorgeous comeback single... [is summed up as] “a ballad about a relationship that was hard to leave,” and you can hear the pain in her voice; wanting something back yet knowing it's gone." FLOOD Magazine
“Shonk sounds like an amalgamation of the past 20 years of star female songstresses ...”  - VICE Magazine

“Shonk’s voice, part of the same throaty jazz-pop lineage as Amy Winehouse” - W Magazine

"Shonk has a powerful voice with echoes of Adele and Alicia Keys, and her songs are steeped in the classic singer-songwriter tradition of artists like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Tracy Chapman.” - Montreal Gazette

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ACROSS THE ROOM TRACKLIST
1. How We Used To Be
2. Remember To Breathe
3. Reminds Me Of You
4. Lately
5. Out Of The Blue
6. Aftertaste
7. Been At This My Whole Life
8. 5AM
9. People Pleaser
10. Let’s Shine Into The Night
11. Quand le calme reviendra
GABRIELLE SHONK TOUR DATES
Jan 27 - Lasalle QC - Studio 1111
Jan 28 - Levis QC - Vieux Bureau de Poste
Feb 21 - St-Jérôme QC - Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault ^
Feb 22 - Granby QC - Palace de Granby ^
Feb 23 - Drummondville QC - Maison des Arts Desjardins ^
Feb 24 - Joliette QC - Salle Rolland-Brunelle ^
Feb 25 - Sherbrooke QC - Theatre Granada ^
Mar 11 - St-Hyacinthe QC - Le Zaricot
Apr 26 - Ottawa ON - The Bronson Centre #
Apr 27 - Quebec City QC - Palais Montcalm #
Apr 28 - Sherbrooke QC - Theatre Granada #
Apr 29 - Trois-Rivières QC - Salle J-Antonio-Thompson #
May 1 - Montreal QC - Corona Theatre #
May 2 - Toronto ON - The Great Hall #
May 4 - Boston MA - Café 939 #
May 5 - New York NY - Mercury Lounge #
May 6 - Philadelphia PA - World Café #
May 7 - Alexandria VA - The Birchmere #
May 9 - Los Angeles CA - Lodge Room #
May 10 - San Francisco CA - Rickshaw Stop #
May 12 - Portland OR - Jack London Revue #
May 13 - Vancouver BC - Hollywood Theatre #
May 19 - Lavaltrie QC - La Chasse-Galerie
May 20 - Jonquière QC - Côté Cour

^ w/ The Barr Brothers
# w/ Charlie Winston

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