Gia Margaret sings in darkness and light
Gia Margaret - Everyone Around Me Dancing
It's been so long since I wrote out the reasons for Gia Margaret's There's Always Glimmer being my favourite album of 2018, that I can no longer find the piece itself. Lost to the weeds of some other version of the internet, of the world, that existed at that time. We carry things with us though. That album exists now as a small puzzle piece in the wider image of my life. Words and lines from it are woven to memory. I've held them up to the light and changed the meaning of them, shaped them to my own spaces. They exist both here and in old rooms of old homes, in the mouths and cheeks of other people too.
You know all of this. It's the same story for all of our favourite songs, these strange things that become extensions of ourselves. You'll have your own stories to tell and words to hold onto. The songs outgrow the weeds even if nothing else does.
Gia Margaret has made more music in the time since then. She's crafted new textures, shapes and colours, wrapped them inside mostly ambient piano songs. She struggled to sing for much of that time, and so lent her voice only sparingly. Draped it gently in the hope it wouldn't break. That too, over time, has found a way back from the soil to the sun, from something buried and out into the open air again.
And so Gia returns this year with Singing, a new collection of songs that centres her voice once more. Its introduction, its gentle opening chapter, comes in the form of 'Everyone Around Me Dancing', three-minutes of woven sound, soft and subtle shapes that glow and pulse and vibrate. Settle and expand as Gia's voice shimmers on the surface, new and not-so at the same time.
“There was a time when I really didn’t know if I would sing again. So once I healed, there was a lot of internal pressure to come back strong. I didn’t know who I was anymore. So it felt like beginning again, and reconnecting with these very old, old parts of myself.”
There is shadow and light here. Reach your arm out far enough and you can be in both at the same time. The song projects something weighty and pensive, palpable with its care. Gia's voice and words lead that, but it's there in the music too. In the piano, the subtle bed of percussion, the aching trumpet that drifts in from the edges, oddly shaped but unhurried like a shadow passing on a wall. It's there too in the atmosphere conjured from the space that is left behind, deliberate sentiments it chooses not to share. Some things need to be held back, after all.
Singing is released April 24th, via Jagjaguwar. It was recorded in London, Eau Claire, and Chicago alongside longtime collaborator Doug Saltzman, Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth, David Bazan, Amy Millan, Deb Talan, Kurt Vile, and Sean Carey.
Watch the video for 'Everyone Around Me Dancing' below; let the light catch it.
EU/UK live dates:
7th September – Cottiers Theatre, Glasgow
8th September – Halle at St. Michael’s, Manchester
10th September – EartH, London
11th September – Jacobikerk, Utrecht
12th September – L’Archipel,Paris
16th September – Genezarethkirche, Berlin
