Kris Delmhorst, Rose Cousins
Doors 6PM / Show 7PM
Seated show
$20ADV / $25DOS
Kris Delmhorst is an American songwriter, singer, instrumentalist, and producer. Over more than 25 years as an independent artist, she has built a body of work characterized by a wide-ranging, genre-agnostic curiosity and constant collaboration. In addition to nine critically acclaimed studio albums, she’s written songs and score for films and TV, produced albums for Session Americana and Jeremy Moses Curtis, contributed instrumentation and vocals to scores of other artists’ work, and performed thousands of shows across the US and Europe. Kris Delmhorst lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, the songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, and their daughter.
“bold and brilliant” - Irish Times
“literate and allusive” - Boston Globe
“moody, euphoric and transcendent” - LA Times
Ghosts in the Garden Album Release!
Following up 2020’s Long Day in the Milky Way, the acclaimed songwriter continues her decades-long career with an enveloping collection of songs offering a layered, kaleidoscopic meditation on grief and loss.
The single, “Something To Show,” is a midnight missive, a field report from the suspended state between sleep and wakefulness. Delmhorst reflects, “I tend to spend the middle of the night ruminating on things, and this song is the story of my consciousness leaving my body lying there, floating out the window out into the night, rowing across a dark lake of sky, looking for answers.”
The dark and dreamy band track is made more otherworldly by Canadian songwriter Rose Cousins’ vocals which add ethereal, phosphorescent veils to the night journey.
“Is this what it’s like to be the stars / all alone, all together, in the dark” Delmhorst asks in the final verse, highlighting the strange conundrum of modern life: how thoroughly connected we are, and how profoundly separated. The song’s refrain - ‘Give me something to show for all my sleepless nights’ - serves as an insomniac’s personal prayer, but speaks to a broader wish as well - that all our struggles might ultimately yield insight, progress, some new wisdom gained.
Ghosts in the Garden’s eleven songs are vividly inhabited by a host of tangible spirits: the departed and the disappeared, sins and their consequences; lost loves, missed chances, and the invisible sorrows that accompany us all. With richly observed details and finely calibrated emotional range, Delmhorst finds the wavelength that illuminates these multitudes. Having summoned them, she doesn’t avert her eyes from her ghosts – or ours – but invites them into an expansive conversation with the living about the ways we’re all shaped by loss, and woven together by unseen threads of love.
“This chapter of life is so complex, with aging parents and a kid inching towards the edge of the nest, and the world teetering on the brink of various forms of collapse. And I’ve lost people, like everyone, and I lie awake at night thinking about ways the future could play out that scare the shit out of me, like everyone. All of this starts to collapse the layers of existence into each other, so it feels like everything is happening at once, past and the future crowding into the present tense. It can be overwhelming, but also sometimes beautiful or even revelatory - and that’s what all these songs are chewing on, one way or another,” Delmhorst muses.
The album was tracked live at Great North Sound Society, a studio built into an 18th-century Maine farmhouse that no doubt harbors ghosts of its own, with a core band of Ray Rizzo (Josh Ritter, Anaïs Mitchell) on drums, Jeremy Moses Curtis (Jeffrey Foucault, Booker T) on bass, and Minnesota songwriter Erik Koskinen on guitars. Engineer Sam Kassirer added keys, and Rich Hinman contributed pedal steel. Finally, Delmhorst invited in a luminous host of fellow songwriters to add vocals to the finished tracks. The guests - Anaïs Mitchell, Rose Cousins, Anna Tivel, Ana Egge, Taylor Ashton, Rachel Baiman, Jabe Beyer, and Jeffrey Foucault - lend unique personality and emotional slant to each track, refracting the songs’ light in all directions.
Through a series of fables and elegies, Ghosts in the Garden explores the hidden country of grief, a land we all inhabit together but often navigate alone. Within this tender and urgent collection of songs, Delmhorst offers a place in the wilderness to gather for solace and communion: “everyone’s here / no one’s gone.”
Rose Cousins’ songwriting plumbs the depths of the human condition. Her work has garnered her two JUNO Awards (2013’s We Have Made a Spark & 2021’s Bravado), two Canadian Folk Music Awards, eleven East Coast Music Awards and one Grammy nomination (2018’s Natural Conclusion), along with praise from the likes of the CBC, No Depression, LA Times, Associated Press, Billboard, Folk Alley, and NPR, who raved “Cousins’ disarmingly fluid vocal tone has the ability to convey the most internalized feelings without an ounce of fuss.” Over the years, she has shared stages with Patty Griffin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jann Arden, Kathleen Edwards, Joe Henry and Anais Mitchell, and her music has fittingly underscored scenes from notable TV shows including Grey’s Anatomy, Fire Country, Batwoman and Heartland.
Featured image: Sasha Pedro