Laura Gibson is excited to announce her forthcoming new album Empire Builder, slated for release on April 1, 2016 via Barsuk, her second record for the label and fourth LP. Join Laura at Atlanta's Red Light Café as she celebrates the release of her new album!
Michael Nau (of Cotton Jones) opens the show.
$10 Adv – $12 Door
Doors @ 7 PM
All ticket sales are final. No refunds.
Empire Builder is named for the Amtrak route Laura Gibson took while moving from Portland, Oregon to New York City in the summer of 2014; a decision to enter graduate school, to move away from a supportive community, a close-knit family and her long-time boyfriend. Out of her comfort zone, she found even more of a challenge than she’d envisioned. Immediately upon arrival, she broke her foot and barely left her 5th floor apartment for the first two months. Then, on March 26th, 2015, her East Village building burned to the ground in a horrific gas explosion which killed two people and left many homeless.
Gibson escaped from her apartment unharmed, but lost everything: all identification, eyeglasses, musical instruments, years of notebooks and every word she had written in response to her move. She spent the next few months rebuilding her life, bouncing between friends’ couches and guest rooms, finishing her second semester, and all the while rewriting the lyrics she had lost. A financial recovery was made possible with help and support from hundreds of friends, fans and strangers. It is no surprise that Empire Builder stands as her most personal record to date.
The album marks a huge leap forward for Gibson as a songwriter, composer and producer. Equally raw and focused, Empire Builder captures a life blown open, an individual mid-transformation. Gibson gathered a stellar band of old friends to complement her songs: guitarist/bassist Dave Depper (Death Cab for Cutie, Menomena), drummer/percussionist Dan Hunt (Neko Case) and composer/violinist Peter Broderick. Other contributors include Nate Query of the Decemberists and vocalist Alela Diane. Gibson co-produced the record with John Askew (The Dodos, Neko Case), spending her school breaks in his home studio and in Broderick’s studio on the Oregon Coast.
Within her fiction studies in grad school, Gibson is finding her legs as a storyteller. Amidst trauma, loss and recovery, she rediscovered songwriting as a means of understanding her own life and choices. Empire Builder grapples with independence, womanhood, solitude, connection and aloneness. If Gibson has a thesis, it’s perhaps within the final words of the title track: “Hurry up and lose me / Hurry up and find me again.” With clear-eyed honesty, urgency and warmth, Empire Builder succeeds in capturing the moment between loss and rediscovery.
Laura Gibson Official Site
Laura Gibson on Facebook
Laura Gibson on Apple Music
The music of Michael Nau sounds effortless. For the past eight years, Nau has written songs with his wife Whitney McGraw under the name Cotton Jones. Along with their rotating cast of auxiliary members, Nau and McGraw kept a busy schedule of releasing records, rehearsing, and touring. Along the way, Nau would track song ideas. There was a stockpile of these recordings—little sonic experiments, layering exercises, the occasional fully-formed song—nestled away in the Cotton Jones compound in the tiny Appalachian city of Cumberland, Maryland, waiting to be pulled from the shelf and ushered into the sunlight. So with the help of a few musician friends, Nau sifted through those recordings.
Given the sporadic formation of the songs off of Mowing there is a surprising continuity and timbre in mood. Album opener “While You Stand” kicks things off with little more than a delicate acoustic guitar line and a modestly hummed chorus, the song creates the inviting aura of sunlight coming through the kitchen window on an early Saturday morning. Like so many classics in the Cotton Jones canon, songs like “Your Jewel”, “So, So Long”, and “Unwound” conjure the sounds that linger on lonely stretches of the radio dial, where Cat Stevens, Harry Chapin, and Randy Vanwarmer crackle on with their infinite humble appeal. Elsewhere on Mowing, you can hear Nau’s beguiling experiments—the bossa nova cadence of “Smooth Aisles”, the woozy chaise lounge instrumental “Mow”, the baroque pop of “Winter Beat.”
Michael Nau / Cotton Jones Official Site
Michael Nau / Cotton Jones on Facebook
Michael Nau on Apple Music
Cotton Jones on Apple Music