Nothing to fear but much to celebrate.
Kris Delmhorst has announced the impending release of her tenth studio album “Ghosts in the Garden” and it comes out on March 7th 2025 on Big Bean Music. Delmhorst is a renowned American songwriter, singer, instrumentalist, and producer with a career spanning over 25 years as an independent artist. Her body of work is characterised by a wide-ranging, genre-agnostic curiosity and constant collaboration. In addition to critically acclaimed studio albums, she’s written music for films and TV as well as contributed instrumentation and vocals to scores of other artists’ work. Currently, she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, the songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, and their daughter and this is her first album since 2020’s “Long Day In The Milky Way” (AUK review here)
Working at Great North Sound Society, a studio built into an 18th-century Maine farmhouse Delmhorst recorded the bulk of the album live with a core band of Ray Rizzo on drums, Jeremy Moses Curtis on bass, and Erik Koskinen on guitars. Engineer Sam Kassirer added keys, and Rich Hinman contributed pedal steel. There was also, an illustrious procession of guest vocalists – Anaïs Mitchell, Rose Cousins, Anna Tivel, Ana Egge, Taylor Ashton, Rachel Baiman, Jabe Beyer and, of course, Jeffrey Foucault – all bringing their own style and take to the tracks
The various stories on this record unfold from the inside out featuring archetypical characters – a fisherman recalling details of a life tethered to the margins, a soldier remembering the universe of a single day and night of love. The hypnotic ‘Wolves’ reckons with the mortality of parents, the ordinary and inevitable orphaning that we all face. “I see wolves / circling the fire / circling the fire with their yellow eyes”, Delmhorst sings, before posing what appears to be the album’s central question: “Do you really love the story if you don’t love the end?”
The first single ‘Something to Show’ is out now and featured below:
