New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today, Lavender Diamond premiered a new song "
In The Middle" on NPR's All Songs Considered Podcast. The song is the fourth track to be taken from Now Is The Time, their first studio album in more than eight years that will be released on December 4, 2020 via Petaluma Records.
"I had a waking vision that I was in a parade of cloud beings, coming in and out of form and falling down to earth for the pure joy of living," explains Becky Stark. "The song tells this story and asks the question - how can we walk in the mystery of being united and divided at the same time? The song asks us to choose the path of love as an act of creative imagination."
The band previously released the official video for "Look Through The Window," "In The Garden" and "This Is How We Rise," which was covered by BrooklynVegan, Pitchfork, Stereogum and many more.
The band captured the core of the album in just two days, relying on gut instinct to guide their every move, and while the material was written well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the result is a particularly timely, vital collection, one that couldn't have come along at a more necessary moment.
"I came to this realization that there's medicine in the music itself," says Stark. "It can lift people up and heal them and point them toward transformation, and that led me to this tremendously powerful need to start writing and recording again."
Back in the studio for the first time in years, Stark and her Lavender Diamond bandmates Steve Gregoropoulos and Ron Regé, Jr. tapped into their old chemistry almost immediately. Though much had changed for each on a personal level (Stark, for instance, often found herself holding her three-year-old daughter in her arms while recording vocals), the group's creative bonds proved as durable and potent as ever. Regé, a gifted illustrator and graphic novelist who has contributed artwork throughout the band's history, laid a subtle yet solid foundation for the record, adding weight and body to Stark's airy performances, while Gregoropoulos put together the album's ornate chamber-folk arrangements, coordinating the remote recording of each orchestral part during quarantine and assembling them all into a cohesive whole.
Now Is The Time was written and produced entirely by Lavender Diamond, and mixed by Tucker Martine at Flora Recording & Playback in Portland, OR. The album features contributions from
Nathaniel Walcott (Bright Eyes), Sasami, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Josh Klinghoffer.
Now Is The Time Tracklist:
1) Look Through The Window
2) This Is How We Rise
3) In The Middle
4) In The Garden
5) Flashback
6) Now Is The Time
7) Ocean and Ground
8) New Religion
9) Straight Through The Night
10) Please Plant The Seeds
11)
Calling On My Nation
