Lou Turner - "Microcosmos" (Official Video)

Описание: Official video for Lou Turner's "Microcosmos," the title track off her third solo record.
Video by Linda Parrot.

MICROCOSMOS is out September 2, 2022 on SPINSTER
Buy from label (vinyl/CD/digital): https://louturner.bandcamp.com/album/...

The follow-up to her acclaimed 2020 record SONGS FOR JOHN VENN (SPINSTER), MICROCOSMOS subverts the troubadour archetype with a cycle of cosmic country songs that seek adventure in stillness and observation, discover the otherworldly in earthly matter, and reveal revelations in groundedness.

As Turner began to compile this collection of songs she'd written at home or in the backyard during the quarantine months of 2020 and 2021, she joked that she was working on her “domestic troubadour record.” She was reading Bernadette Mayer’s feminist epic poem Midwinter Day, while listening to Joni Mitchell’s Hejira (which she calls “the ultimate road album”), as well as other 70s singer-songwriters—Jerry Jeff Walker, Neil Young, and Michael Hurley in particular. Turner says of MICROCOSMOS “Musically, these songs are mostly in the country/folk vein of the 70s songwriter but lyrically they’re challenging those tropes or totally subverting them altogether, talking about commitment and love—the small microcosmic things that make up the fabric of everything.”

She was thinking about how on Hejira, Joni recontextualizes “the road” as a feminist space for solitude and self-confrontation, which as Turner notes, “a lot of the rambler-gamblers aren’t strong enough to do.” On MICROCOSMOS, Turner’s home and mind are her road, as she finds magic in a friend’s rising bread dough, a metaphor for love in pocket lint, the humor of a burp in the middle of a kiss, the spiritual in the everyday.

On the title song, “Microcosmos,” Turner lays out a central theme of the record and much of her writing in general, which she describes as, “investigating how big, spiritual ideas or meaning can be found in the infinitesimal.” Over ethereal psaltery pedal effects, warm and hypnotic upright bass, and acoustic guitar arpeggios, she sings, referencing Hamlet, “If I were bound in a nutshell of infinite space/That’s where we crackle in good grace and see face to face/We cut our context into pieces we can swallow/But something that melts was never hollow/But full of microcosmos.” The domestic troubadour has made her entrance.