“Earthsong” follows the August single “Lucky #8”, an irrepressible ode to dancing as a bulwark against the “tidal pools of pain” and the “theory of collapse,“ featuring special guest Cass McCombs on slide guitar. The release of “Lucky #8” accompanied the album announcement with a tender video Jennifer created using footage of heroic, historic gymnastics routines that were a formative part of her childhood. Now seen through the rearview, these routines take on a new poignance and are embraced differently in Castle’s adulthood. As she gratefully sings in the song’s chorus, ‘so just give the money to the dancers / while their hips go figure eight / and they entrance us with the answers / and we hope and pray the message ain’t too late.’ According to Castle, “Lucky #8”, “sort of has that energetic vibe to it, where it attempts a stunt lyrically (in my mind) to absorb all the possibilities of life into one moment and to be okay with that complexity, instead of fracturing off into myriad neurotic narratives.”
Upon its release, “Lucky #8” caught the attention of Pitchfork, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, and Aquarium Drunkard, who remarked that Castle “emerges as an ambassador for celestial divinity—leaping in song in celebration of its ability to liberate us of our existential dread, almost parental in its omniscient embrace,” while The FADER named the track one of their Songs You Need In Your Life, stating: “A master of channeling both everyday enigmas and larger existential ones, Jennifer Castle creates songs that shelter. The indie folk singer-songwriter’s new single has the streamlined forward motion of a swan landing on a still lake, a graceful figure splashing down with waves of propulsive guitars.”
The ravishing country-soul ballad “Blowing Kisses”, which also appears on Camelot, was originally released in June following a three and a half year hiatus, along with a video which she created to accompany the single. Featuring a sweeping string arrangement by Owen Pallett, performed by Estonia's FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra, “Blowing Kisses” can be heard in its entirety during the pivotal scene of the penultimate episode of the third season of FX's The Bear. Jennifer discussed the song’s use on the show and the serendipitous backstory involving her longtime friendship with Matty Matheson (Canadian chef and restaurateur who portrays the beloved handyman Neil Fak on the show) and their real-life history working together in a restaurant in this terrific interview for CBC. ”Blowing Kisses” also caught the attention of Rolling Stone, Brooklyn Vegan, Consequence, Esquire and many more upon its release.
Jennifer Castle has confirmed live dates in this fall, starting in Canada, followed by select dates in Scandinavia:
JENNIFER CASTLE - LIVE
Oct 9 - Baie Verte, Sackville, NBwith Jon Mckeil
Oct 10 - Nowadays Festival, Dartmouth, NS
Oct 11 - The Cap, Fredericton, NB, with Jon Mckeil / Kelly McMichael
Oct 22 - Folken, Stavanger, NOR
Oct 24 - Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, SWE
Oct 25 - Pygméteatern Theatre, Stockholm, SWE
Dec 21 & 22 - Tranzac Club, Toronto, ON - Solstice/Camelot Release Show
MORE ABOUT CAMELOT
Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armored knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.
Camelot, Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or its myriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once her most monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike with crisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes, these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions.
‘Back in Camelot’, she sings on the lilting, vulnerable title track, ‘I really learned a lot / circles in the crops and / sky-high geometry’. The album opens with a candid admission of sleeping in the unfinished basement,’ an embarrassing joke that comes true. But the dreamer is redeemed by dreaming, setting sail in her airborne bed above ‘sirens and desert deities’. If she questions her own agency—whether she is ‘wishing stones were standing’ or just ‘pissing in the wind’—it does not diminish the ineffable existential jolt of such signs and wonders.
This abiding tension between belief and doubt, magic and pragmatism, self and other, sacred and profane, and even, arguably, paganism and monotheism, suffuses these ten songs, which limn an interior landscape shot through with sun-striped shadows of “multi-felt dimensions” both mystical and quotidian. The epic scale and transport of “Camelot”, with its swooning strings, gives way dramatically to “Some Friends”, an acoustic-guitar-and-vocals meditation in miniature on Janus-faced friends and the lunar and solar temperatures of their promises—’bright and beaming verses’ versus hot curses—which recalls her minimalist last album, 2020’s achingly intimate Monarch Season. (In a symmetrical sequencing gesture, the penultimate track, the incantatory “Earthsong”, bookends the central six with a similarly spare solo performance and coiled chord progression, this time an ambiguous appeal to … a wounded lover? a wounded saint? our wounded planet?)
Those who “Trust” accuses of treacherous oaths spit through ‘gilded and golden tooth’—cynics, critics, hypocrites, gurus, scientists, doctors, lovers, government, the so-called entertainment industry—sow uncertainty that can infect the artist, as in “Louis”: ‘What’s that dance / and can it be done? What’s that song / and can it be sung?’ Answering affirmatively is “Full Moon in Leo”, which finds the narrator dancing around the house with a broom, wearing nothing but her underwear and “big hair.” But the central question remains: who can we trust, and at what cost faith, in art or angels or otherwise?
Castle’s confidence in her collaborators is the cornerstone of Camelot. Carl Didur (piano and keys), Evan Cartwright (drums and percussion), and steadfast sideman Mike Smith (bass) comprise a rhythm section of exquisite delicacy and depth. This fundamental trio anchors the airiness of regular backing vocalists Victoria Cheong and Isla Craig and frames the guitars of Castle, McMurrich, and Paul Mortimer (and on “Lucky #8,” special guest Cass McCombs). Reprising his decennial role on Castle’s beloved 2014 Pink City, Owen Pallett arranged the strings for Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra.
Pallett’s crowning achievement here is “Blowing Kisses,” on which Castle contemplates time and presence, love and prayer—and how songwriting and poetry both manifest and limit all four dimensions: ‘No words to fumble with / I’m not a beggar to language any longer’. Such rare moments of speechlessness—’I’m so fucking honoured’, Jennifer bluntly proclaims—suggest a state ‘only a god could come up with’. (If Camelot affirms Castle as one of the great song-poets of her generation, she is not immune to the despairing linguistic beggary that plagues all writers.)
Camelot evinces a thoroughgoing faith not only in the natural world—including human bodies, which can, miraculously, dance and swim and bleed and embrace and birth—but also in our interpretations of and interventions in it: the ‘charts and diagrams’ of “Lucky #8”, a daydreamt billboard on Fairfax Ave. in LA in “Full Moon in Leo”, the bloody invocations of the organ-stained “Mary Miracle”, and all manner of water worship, rivers in particular. (Notably, Jennifer has worked as a farmer and a doula.)
The album ends with Castle’s repeated, exalted, insistence that she’s ‘not alone here’ in “Fractal Canyon”. But where is here? The word “utopia” itself constitutes a pun, indicating in its ambiguous first syllable both the Greek “eutopia,” or “good-place”—the facet most remembered today—and “outopia,” or “no-place,” a negative, impossible geography of the mind. Utopia, like its metonym Camelot, is imaginary. Or as fellow Canadian songwriter Neil Young once sang, ‘Everyone knows this is nowhere’.
‘Can you see how I’d be tempted’, Castle asks out of nowhere, held in the mystery, ‘to pretend I’m not alone and let the memory bend?’
