New York, NY (Top40 Charts) On his debut solo album Forever Overhead, Hey Rosetta! frontman and principle songwriter Tim Baker warmly welcomes you in. The first words we hear him sing on the lead single "
Dance" are akin to a toast: "Here's to the other side, lifted high." About the track, Baker notes, '"
Dance" is a song about longing - longer for love/lust/intimacy/connection, for youth/the past, and for nature/larger world. For me this has always been a song sung from someone held apart - convalescing maybe - from someone dreaming of being alive and close to love and something important."
What follows "
Dance" are eleven songs centered on kinship and the complexities of human connection, and show that Baker's raw and observational song-writing - which was at the heart of the 12 year journey with his previous band, Hey Rosetta! and their multi-award winning and nominated career - is still as affecting as ever.
Forever Overhead, set for release on April 19, 2019 via Arts & Crafts, is available now for pre-order.
With "
Dance" Baker longs for connection. The track features soft and buoyant piano chords, 70s pop style instrumentation and a piercing guitar riff. Like Forever Overhead as a whole, the track seeks to bring beauty and hope into listeners' lives. When crafting the album, Baker drew from '70s songwriters like
Jackson Browne and
Randy Newman whose music filled his childhood home, as well as from his contemporaries (Feist, Leif Vollebekk, The Barr Brothers). Produced by Marcus Paquin (The National, Local Natives), Forever Overhead blends piano ballads with ebullient folk-rock tracks featuring Liam O'Neill (Suuns), Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station), as well as Mishka Stein & Joe Grass (Patrick Watson).
In February of 2018, Tim travelled across Canada solo to play a handful of intimate shows (which sold out immediately) in some of the oddest venues: a book store, living rooms, a ski lodge, the rink bar during a curling tournament and a hotel room Tim lived in for a week. This intentional, unconventional approach allowed him to distill the purest elements of these songs by road-testing them in the most challenging of circumstances - alone in front of silent, small, attentive audiences. All delivered from the heart and either by piano or guitar and most of which will comprise a 5 song live video EP/doc style mini series entitled "The Side Door Sessions." He opened a succession of shows for Bahamas last fall.
Tim will embark on a headline tour around release time, with a home-town show in St. John's on April 20 and then through Canada and the US to California by June. All dates are listed below. Tickets will be on sale Friday at 10 am local time.
