New York, NY (August 4, 2020) — The songs of Kris Delmhorst transform like breath turning to mist on a cold, clear night; the inner made visible. The veteran Americana artist will release Long Day in the Milky Way, her eighth album, next week on August 14 via CEN/TheOrchard. Today Delmhorst released “Horses In The Sky,” the video for which premiered this morning at Folk Alley.
The song is a much-needed encouragement to see the beauty and wonder in this sad and frightening world. Not too long after writing it, a friend of hers took his own life, and the next time she sang it on stage she realized it’s about hope – finding hope in hopelessness.
“I didn’t have a personal moment of hopelessness that sparked the song but I think it was a reaction to the darkness of the general world vibe,” she says. “Darkness creeps up on you, on us all. Life is pain and we have to love it anyway. It’s a commiseration, a hand on the shoulder, a plea.”
Called “bold and brilliant” by the Boston Globe and “transcendent” by the LA Times, Delmhorst wrote most of the songs for the album at a retreat in New Hampshire surrounded by a trusted community of fellow songwriters, designing them with her friends’ participation in mind, building in load-bearing vocal parts that define the album’s sound — one that’s world-weary but hopeful, responding to a time of global anxiety with a missive straight from the chest.
“As so often is the case with Delmhorst’s songs, each one provides the listener with a tiny refuge, a place of comfort to curl inside and ride out the storms of the world, such is the soothing effect of her voice and vision, says Kelly McCartney of Folk Alley. “She’s exactly the balm we need in this particular moment of both individual and collective grief.”
With vivid songwriting, soulful delivery, and adventurous arrangements that stretch the limits of genre, Delmhorst invites the listener to look both out and in, to take in the full kaleidoscope of life’s contradictions – frustration, transcendence, heartbreak, love – and to locate the grace within the struggle, the beauty in the dark.