September 8, 2022

Alela Diane – Camellia: New Song Of The Day

Alela Diane releases Camellia ahead of the release of her 6th album, Looking Glass. If you haven’t heard of her, you should listen now.

Here’s the record company blurb with more:

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Alela Diane has shared her new single, “Camellia,” available now at all DSPs and streaming services HERE. “Camellia” heralds the Portland, OR-based artist’s eagerly awaited sixth studio album, Looking Glass, arriving everywhere via Soundly Music on Friday, October 14. Pre-orders are available now HERE.

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. The epic and evocative new track was met by applause from such media outlets as KCRW, which declared it “a balm for these turbulent times…While not a prolific artist, Diane works to delicately craft her work for the most impact.”

In addition, Looking Glass is highlighted by such emotional new songs as “Paloma” and “When We Believed,” both of which are joined by official visualizers streaming now at Diane’s official YouTube channel. 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 getting underway October 15 in Berlin, Germany. North American dates will be announced soon. For updates and ticket information, please visit aleladiane.com/tour.

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 harmonize 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 (Neko Case, My Morning Jacket, The Decembrists) 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.”

Alela Diane TRACKLIST