Joan Alsina
‘Trapped In The Fog’, Joana Serrat’s new song and lead track from her forthcoming album ‘Dripping Springs’, featuring members of Israel Nash/Midlake, is available to stream & download from today.
For her fourth album in five years, Joana Serrat travelled from her home in Vic, Barcelona to the Texas Hill Country outside Austin. There she teamed up with Israel Nash at his Plum Creek Sound studio near the town of Dripping Springs. For the recording sessions Nash & Serrat corralled a stellar crew of musicians: Joey & Aaron McClellan, (Midlake, BNQT, John Grant, Israel Nash), Eric Swanson & Josh Fleischmann (Israel Nash), Dave Simonett (Trampled By Turtles) and Dennis Love (Futurebirds), as well as Nash himself providing additional guitar and backing vocals. Israel Nash produced the album, with Ted Young (Grammy award winner for The Rolling Stones) on engineering and mixing duties.
It was no mean feat to gather all these creative talents and get them working together as a team, but as Israel Nash commented, “it was very easy to work with Joana because she knows where she wants to go and she leads us all there. Joana’s lyrics are brilliant. She uses images and colours to describe her songs and luckily that’s the way we are used to working.” Joey McClellan adds, “her voice was our guide”.
The resulting album – which Joana named after the local town – is unsurprisingly Joana Serrat’s most Americana album to date. Mojo described her last album Cross The Verge as “Mazzy Star guesting on an early Neil Young demo”, but with Dripping Springs she has produced a far more rounded and polished piece of work. Serrat explains, “it’s an album that deals with farewells but is filled with an optimistic melancholy that doesn’t isolate nor enclose the spirit and determination to realise our own dreams”. It was a bold move by the young Catalan to cross the Atlantic to work with a bunch of American musicians that she had admired from afar but had never met.
What she came away with is, however nothing short of magnificent and should see Serrat building on her existing achievements which have included a BBC 6Music Recommends Track Of The Week selected by Gideon Coe and Lauren Laverne the latter commenting “she’s an amazing artist an astonishing talent and I love her songwriting”. Within the last year Joana has toured with The Jayhawks, The Handsome Family & Courtney Marie Andrews played the main stage at Primavera Sound Festival showcased at SXSW and has been invited to Nashville in September to showcase at AmericanaFest 2017.
Spanish music magazine Mondo Sonoro keen to review the new record has already awarded it 9/10 telling readers “It’s hard to explain why you like a record sometimes it’s just a matter of skin: if it gives you goosebumps that’s it. In other words a record gets to you when it touches something inside like a kind of spring that triggers a chain of emotions. An artist either has this or not but it’s something that can never be forced… But all that would mean nothing if Joana Serrat wasn’t rolling in talent and sensitivity in this album if she didn’t have “that thing” capable of shaking your spirit.”
PRAISE FOR 2016 ALBUM ‘CROSS THE VERGE’
“like Mazzy Star guesting on an early Neil Young demo”
MOJO
“definitive confirmation of her enormous talent”
TOP 10 NATIONAL ALBUMS 2016
EL PAIS
#11 THE MOST OUTSTANDING RECORDS OF 2016
LA VANGUARDIA
“Her soft and genuine voice opens you up to a new world, a world of dreams and smooth and silken atmospheres”
ROLLING STONE FRANCE
“‘The voice of an angel’ is an expression often used by music reviewers but despite it not being on best form owing to tiredness from a hard day of travelling, few could argue that Joana Serrat’s isn’t just that.”
TOO MANY BLOGS
“Joana Serrat puts us in a dream, asking us to walk across an ocean of desires and re-discover with her a place of shadows, deserts and endless echoes.”
#1 TOP NATIONAL ALBUMS 2016
BLISSTOPIC
“fragile, precious and alluring”
DROWNED IN SOUND
“…the spectre of Joanna Newsom hangs heavy on her breathy vocal – evokes the sweeping alt-country of Lambchop. Gorgeous.”
NME
“There can be absolutely no doubt that she is an amazingly talented artist and songwriter.”
SONIC BANDWAGON
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