CARTER TANTON ANNOUNCES NEW SELF-TITLED ALBUM
OUT MAY 7TH, 2021 (WESTERN VINYL), PRE-ORDER NOW
Carter Tanton is excited to announce his new self-titled album, due out on 7th May 2021 via Western Vinyl. Politically charged lead single “Steep Angles” takes a lyrical cue from Sinead O’Connor’s “Black Boys On Mopeds”. In the song, he reflects upon lingering Civil War monuments, an iconic Baltimore dirt-bike racing crew called the “12 O’ Clock Boys,” and the forgotten gravesite of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth – all three existing within a few blocks from his home.
Carter Tanton delivers such emotionally charged honest compositions. Lyrically pulling your attention before the tender vocal harmony glides above the warm atmosphere and you embrace the sublime ensemble created.
Tanton had to say on the track:
“‘Steep Angles’ was written in the immediate months after the events of Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. That summer with my windows open I woke up nearly every night to the sound of dirt-bikes racing across North Avenue, two blocks from where I lived. The crew’s path takes them past Greenmount Cemetery where John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, is buried in an indecipherable grave. In response to Charlottesville, Baltimore’s mayor had ordered all remaining Confederate statues throughout the city to be removed in the middle of the night to avoid more violence. One of the statues (erected by the “Sisters of the Confederacy”), I could see from my door and another had stood in the park where I learned to throw a baseball with my dad. They had been there since the early 20th century and I had never bothered to read the memorialized script wrapping around the marbled pedestals. A profound, vivified perspective haunted me – the irreverent appropriation of an historically white & rural dirt-bike culture, the man who killed the President to defend the slavery system buried within earshot of their screaming engines, and all while the country reckoned with itself over the integrity or insult of the statues still standing. Flowing from Sinead’s song, an evolution from mopeds to dirt-bikes seemed a potent symbol for the rising stakes of American cultural clashes, which since 2017 have been echoed globally with statues like the one of Edward Colston in Bristol this summer rightfully erased from the landscapes they exploited.”
Carter Tanton has been performing and recording music since the age of 15. Over the years, Tanton has toured and recorded with numerous artists including Marissa Nadler, Strand of Oaks, Lower Dens, and The War on Drugs. In 2012, he assembled Freeclouds, his first collection of songs for Western Vinyl. A couple of years later, Tanton moved to England where he wrote all of the songs on his sophomore solo album Jettison the Valley, which featured vocal contributions by Nadler and Sharon Van Etten. “Steep Angles” bears the hallmarks of a stripped down and intimate sound, which permeates Tanton’s latest material, a stark departure from his previous solo efforts. Recorded with one mic, a guitar and piano, in the empty rooms, staircases, and hallways of his Baltimore childhood home as it lay on the market waiting to be sold, Tanton’s voice opens up in a way reminiscent of his former band, Tulsa.
Carter Tanton track list:
1. Out Fayette
2. Willowy Five
3. V Rose
4. Steep Angles
5. Uneven High Places
6. Honey in Tea
7. 22
8. Mirrors
9. Gunnin’ For the Stem
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