Kris Delmhorst - Long Day in the Milky Way (2020)

You don’t have to believe in anything mystical to feel the molecules around you shift just a little when you listen to Kris Delmhorst. Her songs transmute like breath turning to mist on a cold, clear night; the inner made visible. Her voice holds memories, like smoke lingering in a sweater from last summer’s campfire. Twining through every layer of consciousness, her music weaves together the magical and the mundane with the strange logic of dreams.

Called “bold and brilliant” by the Boston Globe and “transcendent” by the LA Times, Delmhorst is a veteran of the indie Americana world, with vivid songwriting, soulful delivery, and adventurous arrangements that stretch the limits of genre. She’s been compared to artists as various as Anaïs Mitchell, Lucinda Williams, and Juana Molina - though she cites Rickie Lee Jones, in all her fearless joy and complexity, as an artistic north star.

With Long Day in the Milky Way, her eighth album, Delmhorst takes a surefooted stride forward, offering the purest distillation yet of her musical sensibilities. Lush with layered vocals and immersive instrumentation, it finds the gifted lyricist at the height of her craft and working with a strong sense of purpose. World-weary but hopeful, the songwriter responds to a time of global anxiety with a missive straight from the chest. Delmhorst invites the listener to look both out and in, to take in the full kaleidoscope of life’s contradictions - persistence, frustration, heartbreak, love - and to locate the grace within the struggle, the beauty in the dark.