Four years after releasing her last album, ‘There Is No Other’, straight into the pandemic, Isobel Campbell returns with her latest, ‘Bow To Love’, which is out via our friends over at Cooking Vinyl on 17th May 2024. To make the album, Campbell chose an environment that spoke to her, recording and co-producing the record with Chris Szczech again in his studio in Los Angeles. The songs on ‘Bow To Love’ make up a collection of originals focused on and inspired by the challenges faced by the world and created by many of its predators and oppressors. The album address the personal as well as a lens on the wider world. In addition to diagnosing and describing the issues, Campbell also considers how we might progress out of what seem like some pretty dark times.
She says: “The album is about what we’re all in right now, and my response to that and my life as a microcosm within that,” says Campbell, before suggesting how exposing modern horrors might prove purgative. “I think there’s a quote from ‘A Course In Miracles’ which says, ‘Love brings up everything unlike itself for the purpose of healing and release.’ Maybe these horrible things are coming up and out so we can get rid of them and things can be better.”
Some of the songs were written in the wake of barbarism’s 2016 double whammy of Trump and the Brexit vote, both of which drew forces from the dark into the light. ‘Bow To Love’ continues the latest phase of Campbell’s career which has taken her from being a founder member of big indie-folk act Belle & Sebastian, a trio of well -received albums with Mark Lanergan and an extended hiatus following a move to California.
Campbell’s eye to the future is seen in the first single (and video), ‘4316’, which contemplates technology creating a new stage in human evolution. Campbell takes a dim view of auto-reactive culture. “I know what I love and it ain’t that,” she says. “I was talking to an Uber driver the other day and I said, ‘I don’t want to be living in a video game.’ And he said, ‘Well, we are.’ I feel like I’m offering a human element in these transhuman days of artificial intelligence.”
As well as the originals, Campbell chose to close ‘Bow To Love’ with a cover of Dire Straits’ ‘Why Worry’ which provides the listener with a note of consolation. And perhaps Campbell too: “My dad had all those records and I would always sing it to myself.”
The first edition of ‘Bow To Love’ on CD will include an exclusive bonus disc featuring French translations of the songs from the album. There will also be a limited edition vinyl version of the album, with the vinyl available in both blue and yellow formats.
