Alela Diane – new single & album announcement
ALELA DIANE
ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF NEW ALBUM
LOOKING GLASS
OUT OCTOBER 14, 2022 VIA NAÏVE
STREAM NEW SINGLE ‘CAMELLIA’ FROM HERE
WATCH ‘LOOKING GLASS’ ALBUM TRAILER HERE
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Alela Diane has shared her new single, ‘Camellia’, available now at all DSPs and streaming services HERE. An official music video/visualiser premieres today at YouTube HERE. ‘Camellia’ heralds the Portland, OR-based artist’s eagerly awaited sixth studio album, Looking Glass, produced by Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, Neko Case, The Decemberists) arriving everywhere via Naïve on Friday, October 14. Pre-orders are available now HERE.
LISTEN TO ‘CAMELLIA’ HERE
PRE-ORDER LOOKING GLASS HERE
An intensely personal new track – on which both her own & Tucker Martine’s young children sing – ‘Camellia’ was written about Diane’s experience of coming extremely close to death whilst giving birth to her youngest daughter in 2017.
Diane’s first new album in more than four years, Looking Glass also includes the recently released single, ‘Howling Wind‘, available for streaming and download HERE. An official live session video is streaming now at YouTube HERE. In addition, Looking Glass is highlighted by such emotional new songs as ‘Paloma‘ and ‘When We Believed‘. An official live session video of ‘Paloma’ is streaming HERE.
Diane will mark the arrival of Looking Glass with a busy live schedule, including and European headline dates including a sold-out how at London St Matthias Church on October 20. North American dates will be announced soon. For updates and ticket information, please visit aleladiane.com/tour.
ALELA DIANE
ON TOUR 2022
OCTOBER
15 – Berlin, Germany – silent green Kulturquartier
18 – Paris, France – Cafe de la Danse
20 – London, United Kingdom – St. Matthias Church – SOLD OUT
Hailed by The Guardian for creating songs like “campfire pipe dreams filled with picket fences, desert sands and paths leading back to you”, Alela Diane grew up in the winding rivers and golden hillsides of Nevada City, California where as a girl she listened to her parents harmonise bluegrass songs in the kitchen. She moved to San Francisco at age 19 and began writing her own songs, making her recorded debut with 2004’s acclaimed The Pirate’s Gospel. A string of increasingly well received albums have followed, supported by extensive touring through North America, Europe, and beyond.
Now, with her cathartic and ethereal sixth studio album, Looking Glass, Diane explores how the past is always with us – a source of sadness sometimes, but also of solace, a kind of permanent foundation on which we all walk into the rest of our lives. Haunting new songs like ‘Dream A River’ resonate with a characteristic braiding of lightness and dark, balancing intensely personal lyrics of imagined catastrophe with a signature shot of bittersweet hope, a possibility that something better might emerge from the ashes.
Produced by Tucker Martine and arranged by longtime friend and fellow musician Heather Woods Broderick, Looking Glass sees Diane accompanied by a stellar line-up of guest musicians including Carl Broemel (My Morning Jacket), Scott Avett (The Avett Brothers), Eli Moore (Lake), Mikaela Davis, Luke Ydsitie (Blind Pilot), and Ryan Fracesconi (Joanna Newsom). The album was made during a time of great personal transition for Diane, recorded during the same weeks that she and her family were selling the Portland, OR house she bought at the age of 26 with money earned from her first royalties contract. Diane’s family had now outgrown the house, but the leaving was bittersweet – it was in that home that she’d been married, divorced, and married again, and become the mother of two children. The emotional and logistical chaos of that moment – along with pandemic-related childcare struggles, historic wildfires raging through the Pacific Northwest, and more – fuels Looking Glass, which like much of Diane’s remarkable body of work, touches often on the various meanings of home, past and present.
With that in mind, Diane and her family moved into a sprawling 1892 Victorian home shortly after recording Looking Glass, a dollhouse-like fixer-upper set on a surprisingly hidden wooded lot in the middle of Southeast Portland. In keeping with Diane’s love of all things antiquarian, the title of the new album, like her new house, also has a 19th Century provenance. The original definition of “looking glass,” Diane notes, is “mirror,” but after Lewis Carroll published the novel Through the Looking Glass in 1871, the term took on a second meaning: “the opposite of what is normal or expected.”
“In the context of the album,” Alela Diane says, “Looking Glass refers to both meanings. It is a portal to past and future, and a reflection on all that lies between.”