(BHM) Acclaimed singer-songwriter Emma Swift announced her long-awaited new album, The Resurrection Game, arriving on Friday, September 12, via her own Tiny Ghost Records. A wide variety of formats are available, including digital, CD, premium D2 black vinyl, cassette, limited edition lavender vinyl, and limited edition blue swirl vinyl. All vinyl editions were pressed at Denver, CO's Paramount Pressing and feature deluxe packaging with a gatefold sleeve and rice paper inner bag.
Swift's first full-length collection of all original material and eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2020's Blonde On The Tracks - which earned worldwide praise for the Sydney, Australia-born, Nashville-based artist's inspired reimagining of eight classic Bob Dylan songs through her own unique musical perspective - The Resurrection Game is heralded by today's premiere of the rhapsodic "No Happy Endings," available everywhere now alongside an official music video.
Shifting gracefully between intimate confession, philosophical musing, and elegiac storytelling, The Resurrection Game sees Emma Swift fusing timeless singer-songwriter touchstones to her own extraordinary experiences with an exquisitely melancholic song cycle born of a personal crisis that left her shattered and forced to pick up the pieces of her inner life. Songs like "Beautiful Ruins" and the album-opening "Nothing and Forever" resonate with insistent, inestimable sadness, the exactitude of Swift's devastatingly candid admissions lifted aloft by the subtle strength of her deep-blue vocals and an evocative breadth of gorgeously baroque musical flourishes.
"I am a big believer in the redemptive power of art," Emma Swift says. "Though many of these songs come from an immensely difficult time in my life, what I'm trying to do here is to alchemize the experience. To make the brutal become beautiful."
The seeds of The Resurrection Game were sown on the heels of a seven-week "nervous breakdown" that saw Swift sectioned in her native Australia. Over a year of recovery followed, a "very fragile" period in which she grappled with what had happened through therapy, medication, and eventually, her art. Working with producer Jordan Lehning (Kacey Musgraves, Rodney Crowell, Caitlin Rose) at Chale Abbey, a residential studio built within a stone barn dating back to the 16th century located on the downs at the southern tip of England's Isle of Wight, as well as Lehning's The Duck in East Nashville, Swift assembled a cadre of Nashville's finest, most in-demand players, including pedal steel master Spencer Cullum (Steelism, Miranda Lambert, Angel Olsen), guitarist Juan Solorzano (Devon Gilfillian, Sheryl Crow), bassist Eli Beaird (Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson, James Bay, Luke Bryan), and drummer Dom Billet (Yola, Phosphorescent), with Lehning handling keyboards and other instruments.
Together, Swift and her collaborators conjured an unabashedly melodramatic, "deliberately lush" musical milieu brimming with imagination and communal energy, Lehning's ornate arrangements creating an atmosphere so intense and cinematic that Swift's tragic tales of catastrophic psychological collapse ultimately prove buoyant and exhilarating. Strewn with keenly incisive wit and heartbreaking accuracy, songs like "How To Be Small" bridge the gap between traditional folk songcraft and self-revelatory confessional poetry. Despite the myriad unpleasantness of her experience, Swift somehow finds wry humor and sweeping beauty as she reckons with the all-encompassing crisis. Swift tells her story with raw clarity and the power of contemplative hindsight, her remarkably self-assured vocals capturing her undeniable anguish but also, within such songs as "No Happy Endings" and "Going Where The Lonely Go," romantic joy thanks to the understanding and sustenance provided by her husband, legendary British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock.
Grounded firmly in enduring musical traditions yet utterly contemporary in viewpoint and execution, The Resurrection Game immediately confirms Emma Swift as a singularly gifted singer and songwriter of immense skill and spirit. Swift trusts to her core that the act of creating something so passionately personal, of giving in completely to her life-altering heartache and despair, is the truest path towards greater connection with her art and the world outside.
"I believe that there is a space for songs about real pain," Swift says. "In this moment in time, we live in a world where we're encouraged to anesthetize what ails us by any means possible. But this record is more about spending time with your sadness, of leaning into that sorrow and facing it head-on.
"Hard times are a part of the seasons of any person's life. You don't have to have an acute mental health crisis to understand this. Everyone experiences grief, pain, tremendous suffering at one time or another. I wouldn't want to live through that particular season again, but I feel duty-bound to honor it. And so I have."
Swift will celebrate the arrival of The Resurrection Game with a very special Undertow tour, a series of major market club dates and intimate fan-hosted events beginning July 17 in Indianapolis, IN and then continuing into September.
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