Damien Jurado is announcing his new album, In the Shape of a Storm, on Mama Bird Recording Co. April 12th today alongside a new, stunningly sparse track “South”. Jurado’s career has seen many iterations and his newest album is no less profound than any previous work, but the stark acoustic arrangements allow Jurado’s every emotional vocal shift to be magnified. The stories here are deeply felt and vividly rendered. They’re not leading you through but letting you come to your own conclusions, as Jurado says, “’South’, like most songs that I write, is a collage of sorts, or collection of snapshots, that center around two characters. One could even presume me, or me as an alternate self. Dark, isolated, and slightly menacing in tone for a waltz number.”
Damien Jurado Tour
2/27 San Antonio, TX, Paper Tiger
2/28 Austin, TX, The North Door
3/01 Dallas, TX, The Wild Detectives
3/02 Dallas,TX, The Wild Detectives
3/07 Los Angeles, CA, Highland Park Ebell Club*
4/05 Portland, OR, Revolution Hall
5/10 Burlington, VT, Arts Riot*
5/11 Portsmouth, NH, 3S Artspace*
5/13 Holyoke, MA, Gateway City Arts*
5/14 Allston, MA, Great Scott*
5/15 Brooklyn, NY, Park Church Co-op*
5/16 Brooklyn, NY, Park Church Co-op*
5/17 Philadelphia, PA, Johnny Brenda’s*
5/18 Washington, DC, U Street Music Hall*
5/20 Pittsburgh, PA, Cabaret at Theater Square*
5/22 Hopewell, NJ, Hopewell Theater*
5/23 Ithaca, NY, The Haunt*
5/24 Toronto, ON, The Drake Hotel*
8/2-4 Happy Valley, OR, Pickathon
*with Anna St. Louis
For more than two decades, Jurado has sung folk songs brimming with prophetic imagination. Whether singing ballads about killers, wounded lovers, UFO cults, or yes, the phantoms of departed friends, he’s populated his work with eerie foretelling, the sense that he’s divining something just on the verge of happening. He wrote his last record, 2018’s The Horizon Just Laughed as a goodbye letter to his home of Seattle, Washington, before he’d even decided to leave there for sunny Los Angeles. And while he recorded the ten songs featured on In the Shape of a Storm months before the passing of his longtime collaborator and close friend Richard Swift, it’s no coincidence that Swift’s death looms over the album. “His absence is very much felt on this record,” Jurado says.
Damien has always worked fast, but In the Shape of a Storm came together with unprecedented speed. Recorded over the course of two hours one California afternoon, it’s Jurado’s sparsest album to date. Gone are the thundering drums and psychedelic arrangements that defined the trilogy of concept albums he made with Swift. Gone even is the atmospheric air that hovered above his early albums for Sub Pop. Here, there’s only Jurado’s voice, acoustic guitar, and occasional accompaniment from Josh Gordon, playing a high-strung guitar tuned Nashville style, rendering its sound spooky and celestial. Though fans have long requested a solo acoustic album, the prospect never made sense to Jurado, until one day it simply did. “It just felt like it was time,” Jurado says. The idea of an unadorned album became its own medium in his mind, like a painter who sets down his brushes and instead opts for charcoal pencils instead.
Damien Jurado’s discography is filled with songs written as miniature movies, cinematic vignettes that capture people, the places they are from, and where they are going. In the Shape of a Storm is his first black and white picture. It’s both a snapshot of two hours in a California recording studio and a document spanning 19 years and a life of music.
Mama Bird Recording Co. is a Portland, Ore. based record label committed to exceptional songcraft. Founded in 2011, their catalog includes acclaimed albums from Haley Heynderickx, Courtney Marie Andrews, Saintseneca, Izaak Opatz, Barna Howard, Matt Dorrien, Myriam Gendron and Vikesh Kapoor, among others.
The album is now available for pre-order on LP, “Aspen Bark” Ltd. LP Variant, CD, and Digital.
In the Shape of a Storm Tracklist
1. Lincoln
2. Newspaper Gown
3. Oh Weather
4. South
5. Throw Me Now Your Arms
6. Where You Want Me to Be
7. Silver Ball
8. The Shape of a Storm
9. Anchors
10. Hands on the Table
