DAVID VERTESI ANNOUNCES NEW LP, FICTIONALIZED, SHARES NEW SINGLE FEAT. JILL BARBER

DAVID VERTESI’S NEW LP, FICTIONALIZED, OUT FEBRUARY 27 ON TINY KINGDOM

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PRE-SAVE FICTIONALIZED HERE
PRE-ORDER FICTIONALIZED VINYL LP HERE

"The most all-encompassing collection of songs from David Vertesi yet, Fictionalized finds the Canadian music lynchpin tackling a concept album of sorts, following the pandemic-era collective spiral to its deepest point." Exclaim! | Most Anticipated Albums of 2024

“A man completely intertwined with Canada’s indie-rock scene, David Vertesi has racked up three solo albums to go along with his work playing and producing alongside acts like Hey Ocean, Said the Whale, Hannah Georgas, and Haley Blais over the last 15 years."
RANGE Magazine | Most Anticipated Albums of 2024

Photo Credit : Justin Broadbent // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

For more than fifteen years, David Vertesi has worked with some of Canada’s most exciting indie-rock projects. First and foremost as a founding member of Juno-nominated west coast staple, Hey Ocean!, while also having played live with artists like Shad, Said The Whale, Dear Rouge, and Hannah Georgas. More recently you will find him producing for emerging favourites like Haley Blais, Noble Son, Riun Garner and more. As a songwriter and producer, Vertesi always brings a uniquely sensuous and brooding sensibility, an intricate sonic depth that multiplies the layers of a song.

In his solo work, these dramatic flairs ignite on full display. Across a spectrum of rough-and-tumble and tightly polished sounds, Vertesi emerges as a centre-stage, dusty spotlight balladeer, a close-to-the-chest storyteller as the narrative core of his songwriting revolves in stories of confusion, loneliness, instability, death, and existential ennui. Across 2010’s Cardiography, 2016’s Sad Dad Cruise Ship, and 2020’s Life Ghouls, Vertesi interrogates these somber questions with tender poetry and a sense of humour. 

His latest LP Fictionalized, out February 27 via Tiny Kingdom is the clearest synthesis of his wide-ranging pop philosophy yet. Effectively a concept album on the collective spiraling of the pandemic years through an intensely personal lens, Vertesi crafts the most potent and memorable melodies of his career. With featured performances from a lineup of some of Vancouver’s brightest talents: Jordan Klassen, Haley Blais, Jill Barber, and Sam Lynch, plus co-production from the likes of Jonathan Anderson (Andy Shauf, Aidan Knight), Klassen (Dear Rouge, Jillian Lake) and Daniel Klenner (Peach Pit, Babe Corner), Fictionalized marks a new and defined landscape for Vertesi. As powerful and personal as he’s ever been, as cathartic and kind as he’s ever appeared. 

Today, he shares the new single, “Mind Reader” featuring Jill Barber, of which he says “Throughout the pandemic, many of my friend's longtime relationships began to crumble. Problems they had ignored for forever seemed to come to a head when they were stuck inside together for the lockdowns. This is loosely based on one of those stories.”

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Throughout his work, Vertesi has made clear that he brings an equal command to choreographing lush and buzzing technologic atmospheres of instrumentation or squeezing the naked emotional heart out of a piano, a steady bass drum, the soft rhythm of a guitar, a choir of harmonies. But it’s his own voice that distinguishes his music, a growling inimitable baritone that deepens his playful work and further darkens his more haunted questions. It’s easy to hear why he draws comparisons to names like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Lou Reed and easy to see why Vertesi has emerged from his collaborative role into a fully formed front-man of his own musical expression.

PRE-SAVE FICTIONALIZED HERE
PRE-ORDER FICTIONALIZED VINYL LP HERE

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FICTIONALIZED TRACKLIST
01 One Day We Woke Up And The World Was Gone
02 Who Am I Now
03 Age Of Celebrity
04 My Parents (ft. Sam Lynch)
05 Fictionalized
06 One In A Million (ft. Jordan Klassen)
07 Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
08 Mind Reader (ft. Jill Barber)
09 Note To Self
10 That’s What’s Up (ft. Haley Blais)

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KAIA KATER RETURNS WITH NEW SINGLE, “THE INTERNET”

KAIA KATER RETURNS WITH NEW SINGLE, “THE INTERNET”, OUT TODAY VIA ACRONYM RECORDS

LISTEN / SHARE “THE INTERNET” HERE
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Photo Credit: Janice Reid // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

The first single from the JUNO Award and Polaris Music Prize nominated artist Kaia Kater since 2021, out today via Acronym Records in Canada, is her debut single for Free Dirt Records in the US.  A preview of a new album coming in the spring, the song comes ahead of a tour of the UK and Europe later this month and kicks off what promises to be a triumphant return for the acclaimed songwriter.

Kater will also be appearing in 2024 as part of newly formed Black string band supergroup, New Dangerfield, featuring Jake Blount, Tray Wellington, and Nelson Williams. Kater’s album will feature key special guests and celebrates the power of women and oppressed people throughout history as they rise up and turn the poison of centuries of oppression into a strange kind of medicine.

"The Internet", encapsulates the manipulation of our modern digital age. Inspired in part by Kate Bush's song “Watching You Without Me”, Kater riffs on old modem sounds by rendering some of the lyrics barely intelligible and slightly garbled.

Kaia Kater premiered the song via an interview with Tom Power for CBC q.

LISTEN / SHARE “THE INTERNET” HERE
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"We're thrilled to welcome Kaia Kater into the Free Dirt family of artists,” says general manager Jonathan Een Newton. “We've long admired her exceptional songwriting as well as her powerful banjo playing. We look forward to sharing more of the gorgeous new music she's crafted on the label soon." Kater will be joining a host of other cutting-edge roots musicians on Free Dirt Records including Willi Carlisle, Jake Blount, Cinder Well, Mama’s Broke, and more.

Kaia Kater’s previous album, 2018’s Grenades on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, saw a wave of acclaim for Kater’s transgressive vision of Black North American roots music, culminating in an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Following this album, she took a break from recording solo work, choosing to focus on film composition and songwriting, though she did release a single with jazz trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah in 2021. Her work in film composition is also coming to fruition this year with the release of the new film My Dead Friend Zoe. Acclaimed composer Dan Romer (Composer Station Eleven, Beasts of the Southern Wild) tapped Kater to co-write a song for the film, and Kater also sang and played banjo throughout the film’s soundtrack. This film features performances from Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, and Morgan Freeman will have its global premiere at SXSW 2024.

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KAIA KATER UK/EUROPE TOUR
Jan 16, 2024 Birmingham - Kitchen Garden Cafe
Jan 17, 2024 London - Paper Dress Vintage
Jan 18, 2024 Bury - The Met
Jan 20, 2024 Glasgow - The Hug and Pint
Jan 24, 2024 Dublin - Women of Note Show
Jan 27, 2024 Belfast - The Deer's Head
Jan 28, 2024 Derry - IMBOLC Festival
Feb 1, 2024 Brighton - Folklore Rooms
Feb 2, 2024 Cambridge - The Portland Arms
Feb 3, 2024 Bristol - The Folk House
Feb 4, 2024 Brussels - Indies Keeping Secret
Feb 6, 2024 Gent - Trefpunt
Feb 7, 2024 Veltem-Beisem - De Melkerij
Feb 8, 2024 Tilburg - Paradox
Feb 9, 2024 Amsterdam - Tolhuistuin Zonzij

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OLD MAN LUEDECKE RETURNS, WITHOUT HIS SIGNATURE BANJO, FOR NEW SINGLE FT. BAHAMAS

OLD MAN LUEDECKE JOINS OUTSIDE MUSIC TO RELEASE NEW SINGLE FEATURING BAHAMAS

LISTEN / SHARE “MY STATUS IS THE BADDEST” FT. BAHAMAS HERE
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PERFORMING JAN 10 - 15 AT TROPIC OF CANCER FESTIVAL - BAJA, CA
PERFORMING JAN 20 AT SANCTUARY ARTS CENTRE - DARTMOUTH, NS

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It’s been a few years since we last heard new music from two time JUNO Award winner Old Man Luedecke. Where exactly has he been? On a scallop boat of course, and working with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas). 

Today, he shares the first new track from their time together, “My Status Is The Baddest”, which sees Chris Luedecke leaving behind his signature banjo to explore songwriting and finding a freedom in it. The track is a joy-filled complaint of parenthood. Channeling Steve Miller and Tom Petty with a breezy existential refrain, Luedecke tries to sort out whether the high road of parenting is espionage against the true nature of the beast. 

‘Am I a coward or a traitor? I’m always at war with my nature’ Holding it all back to be a good parent, or trying to be, most of the time. Suppressing flight urges, keeping the train on the rails, trying to get the kids what they need. All these things are in this feel good ditty about how the joys and bliss of parenting are also really a lot of work, doubt and heartache with little right to but also little escape from complaint. Sweet otherworldly guitar lines keep the humour ethereally above the Steve Miller-like candy rock of the melody.

LISTEN / SHARE “MY STATUS IS THE BADDEST” FT. BAHAMAS HERE
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MORE ABOUT OLD MAN LUEDECKE
How did Old Man Luedecke go from touring the world with his banjo to suddenly giving it all up to work as a deckhand on a scallop boat, and abandoning his signature instrument?

“I was just going over to my scallop farming neighbour’s house to get some scallops to have for dinner”, says Chris Luedecke. “Knowing that the live music world had slowed down, he asked me if I wanted a job on his boat” And so, Luedecke accepted and began going out to sea in the North Atlantic, not far from his family home in rural Nova Scotia. He was giving up the game of music. 

Throughout that time working on the water, song ideas would pop in his head, and Chris would stash them away in his sea salt-stained notebook and battered iphone, not sure if anything would ever come of them. During downtimes, Chris and his family would host all-day sap boils and wiener roasts over an open fire on their property where they tapped their maple trees and boiled the sap to make syrup in the late days of several winters. A frequent visitor to these fires was Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) who brought his family over for the BBQ and syrup and to chat music and play around on their guitars. 

“What about not playing the banjo on your next record?” suggested Jurvanen. Initially, Chris thought those may have been fighting words, and prepared to throw down with his fellow JUNO Award winner. Luckily, it didn’t come to blows and Chris understood that Afie’s question was rooted in how much of a fan he was of Chris’s song writing, and that maybe perceptions of the banjo distracted from that. 

“I was a musician, a banjo player, known for my old-time Appalachian-based sound, and Afie thought that we should let go of the chains and expectations that come with writing songs around an instrument, and that I should just write the songs without the instrument in mind. He convinced me to abandon my signature sound, and I had this newfound sense of freedom in my song writing.”

It might have been easier to just quit the game, and stick to scallops, but being able to let go of the instrument that made him, brought new life to his song-making process. And fans need not worry, the banjo is always close at hand. There’s a treasure trove of songs that have soundtracked the lives of many, that feature that signature sound. The absence of the banjo is not forever, just for now.

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