29 May Diana Darby releases new album & shares videos
DIANA DARBY
releases new album ‘Otterson’
album out 29 May 2026 on Delmore Recording Society
and shares video for new single ‘We Are Free’
Watch/share video for ‘We Are Free’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=docNnPb-lXo
“conjuring visions of a wounded mind running amok in a flowing field of flowers” – CMJ
“This is the ethereal with blood beneath it” – Oxford American
“somewhere between Nick Drake, Mazzy Star and Galaxie 500” – The Portland Phoenix
“Demonic dreams floating on celestial melodies, the marriage of heaven and hell.” – NPR
Watch/share video for ’Say Goodbye’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD1Cn2TB85E
It’s been twelve years since my last record, IV (Intravenous), was released. It’s been a long road, full of death, injury and rebirth. I doubted if I would ever make another album again, but here I am. My album for a hurting world. I help it hopes.” – Diana Darby
Diana Darby – Otterson
Diana began work on her latest album, Otterson, during the COVID shutdown. “I was locked away like pretty much everyone else on the planet. And it was that isolation that let me go deeper into myself, and then these songs started coming. At the time, I didn’t understand what they were all about, but a unifying theme emerged – loss. Loss of a relationship, an animal, self, faith, and a shedding of emotions I had carried around for years.”
For Diana, it wasn’t the writing that proved the most difficult, but rather, the recording. “I’m used to recording alone in my apartment, on 4-track cassette. This time, I was encouraged by other musician-friends to learn to use a DAW. They all said how easy it would be. It wasn’t. The whole experience was crazy and pretty much everything that could break, or go wrong technically, did. It was so bad, I almost gave up. But I didn’t. I kept trying.”
The result is a collection of songs that fold into the listeners psyche with quiet insistence. Like prayers sung in the dark to a hypnotic melody. Mid-tempo, 1966 influenced sounds lull you in, before stark, Broadway-on-acid numbers completely disarm you. A few of the songs were written years earlier and re-discovered. “When my Apollo was in the shop, and the new laptop was also in the shop, I pulled out some old hard drives and found these lost recordings. I put three that I especially liked into Logic to see if I could work with them and soon realized that they added another dimension. They give the album a layer of ghostly eeriness which I love.”
“It’s that ghostliness that drew me to use a painting which has hung on my living room wall for years, as the album cover.” It is a painting of a young, introverted woman with large eyes, and long dark hair, who seems otherworldly. “When people see it, they almost always ask if it’s me.” The painting was created by John Otterson. “John lived in my apartment building in Santa Monica. Years earlier he had been in a horrible car accident. He survived, but his wife and child who were in the car with him, did not. For months, he lived in a rehab facility. Originally, the doctors said he’d probably never walk again. But they were wrong. He did walk again because he didn’t give up.”
When Diana was in film school at USC, she made a documentary about John. “After deciding to use John’s painting, I pulled out my film (super 8!) and re-watched it. I realized how much I have in common with John at this point in my life. I had also suffered a serious injury in the past ten years, and experienced the loss of both of my parents, who I’d been caring for. In the film, John says, ‘Painting is a feeling thing. It has to do with the intensity of your feelings of the world around you. How much have you been through? Have you lost something dear to you? All these things add up to make a more intense human being’.
Intensity has never been in short supply on Diana Darby albums. “I feel things deeply, probably too deeply for my own well-being. But those feelings also fuel me, and diving into dark holes is the only way through, if I want to come out on the other side.” On “Dear Jane,” Diana’s voice cracks and falters, as if she herself were made of ice. She paints a bleak, arctic world that refuses to melt regardless of the warmth of the sun. – A world where black crows appear out of nowhere then vanish as quickly as they arrived. A world that never changes for the singer, who remains frozen in time with heartache. “Raindog” is a voyeuristic confession, whispered to a soul left out in the cold, never knowing the warmth they have been denied. “And What Goes On” is a psychotropic ballad exploring the self-inflicted torture of rumination. Every song on Otterson is unflinchingly honest, often inspired by nature with all its wildness, characters wearing facades for faces leading duplicitous lives, stalkers desperate for love, and sweet dream-like lullabies for the dead.
Otterson deserves to be felt before it’s framed. It deserves to be lived before it’s labeled.
Otterson will be available in better UK shops from 29th May, and will be released on vinyl, CD and digital formats.
above photo by Ebet Roberts
Diana Darby – biography
Diana also offers this playlist of selections from her past LPs for folks unfamiliar with her work.
Oncemoreagain: https://bandcamp.com/private/SZ11I5T8
Diana Darby was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She spent her hot Texas summers walking along railroad tracks, picking wild blackberries and listening to the made-up songs in her head. She was a loner, often sitting on the playground steps watching other children. She learned to observe through the pain of isolation. Her only salvation was her pen and paper. Her words were her oxygen.
Anxious to leave her chaotic family behind, Diana graduated from high school at sixteen and moved to Los Angeles to attend USC where she graduated with a B.A. in theatre and a minor in music. She pursued acting, briefly, but auditioning only reinforced her feelings of invisibility. She quickly realized the power of the pen and returned to USC to pursue an M.F.A. in writing and directing from the film school. After graduation, Diana applied to and was accepted into the Warner Bros. Writing Workshop. She was one of only two graduates of the program selected to be put on staff as a comedy writer at Warner Bros.
When Diana’s position with Warner Bros. ended, Diana packed up and moved to Nashville to pursue her love of poetry and song. She worked in Nashville as a lyricist, writing songs with established writers who’d had cuts with Nanci Griffith, John Prine and the Dixie Chicks. After co-writing for a year, Diana met Mark Linn (Delmore Recording Society) on a rainy Halloween night. Mark was intrigued by the more primitive songs Diana was writing on her own. After hearing her sing them, Mark was anxious to get her into the studio. The two flew to Brooklyn to record Diana’s first album, “Naked Time,” with Mark Spencer. The album was hailed as, “conjuring visions of a wounded mind running amok in a flowing field of flowers” – CMJ; and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition. A multi-city tour across the United States followed.
Since that first album, Diana has released four more albums: “Fantasia Ball”, “The Magdalene Laundries”, “I.V.” and “Diana Darby’s Last Words to The Planet.” She has toured Europe and the U.S. extensively, been a guest on NPR programs, “Here and Now” and “The State of Things”, and on multiple tribute albums. Her rendition of “Jesus Was A Capricorn”, for a Kris Kristofferson tribute album, was singled out as a “revelation” in the SF Weekly, and caught the ear of Italian label “Loveboat Records”, who licensed her album, “Fantasia Ball”, for release in Italy and arranged a month-long performance tour. That tour led to more invitations to perform throughout Europe. Along with touring, Diana has continued pursuing her poetry, writing over fifteen hundred poems and publishing four chapbooks. Her love of language and rhythm, and her willingness to be vulnerable on and off the page, makes her a compelling artist with a voice worthy of being heard.