ITASCA: SPRING (PoB-047)

Itasca, the mesmeric project of California songwriter Kayla Cohen, has announced her new album Spring, due out November 1. The Fader announced the album today and premiered its first single “Bess’s Dance,” describing it as “a beguiling rumination.” NPR Music agrees, writing that “Kayla Cohen’s got a voice that glows like the sun at dusk, and plays acoustic guitar with a nimble yet intricate touch.”

Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Featuring contributions from Chris Cohen, Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington (whose cinematic string arrangement graces “Bess’s Dance”), and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw, Spring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date.

Itasca plays Los Angeles’ Zebulon with Dollar Band this Thursday, August 22. Details are HERE.

Pre-Order Spring

$9.00 – $30.00

Or support via:  Bandcamp  (all formats/UK shipping) |  Other Options (physical/digital/int’l) | Local Stores

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGLGDT-9ZI4KQZV39Vjqqmprf0Gem82D9]

The deluxe LP edition features 140g vinyl; heavy-duty board jacket; full-color insert with lyrics and additional artwork; color LP labels; and high-res Bandcamp download code. The CD features a gatefold board jacket and LP replica art. Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the November 1, 2019 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “Bess’s Dance.” For digital-only preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

Use coupon code BESS during checkout through Nov. 1 for 40% off Itasca’s prior album Open to Chance. The same deal applies on Bandcamp.

Photo by Joanne Kim.

Acclaim for Itasca

It all suggests the balm of a gentle breeze beneath the bright sunlight, a feeling you’d want to capture indefinitely. Cohen does exactly that, suspending an instant in eternal amber. She is able to conjure up something resembling transcendence. – Pitchfork

The mellow glow [her music] generates is reason enough to want to bask in its evanescent light for as long as life’s harsher aspects can conceivably be held at bay. – NPR

Itasca’s old-soul vocals and antique acoustic guitar conjure up classic folkies from years past like Vashti Bunyan. – Vogue

Music that gives a warm, floaty, spectral take on the singer-songwriter music of the ’70s. – Stereogum

Simultaneously spare and complex, observational folk ballads turned psychic and strange by metal-stringed dissonance and troubling Symbolist metaphor. – MOJO

RIYL Michael Chapman, Bridget St John, Mike Cooper, Steve Gunn, Gun Outfit, Ryley Walker, Aldous Harding, Weyes Blood, Meg Baird, Jessica Pratt, Linda Perhacs, Sibylle Baier, Bert Jansch, Vashti Bunyan, Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris, Moby Grape, Chris Darrow, The Farm Band, Mary Margaret O’Hara

  • Photo by Joanne Kim.
  • Photo by Hans F. Wagner.

More Spring Musings

On her experiences in New Mexico that led to the creation of Spring, Cohen writes:

“I was searching for real silence and depth, and wanted to get as far away from the city as I could. The song “Bess’s Dance” outlines the album’s story, the pursuit of meaning that came out of that winter of walking, writing, and playing guitar in an old adobe house. The song is a baroque flaneur’s stage, with cameos by the jester, Bess… and Pan, the satyr god of play… it describes being pulled into the laughter and games of the city, the Commedia dell’Arte, and like the jester’s stand it ends with a dance, a few steps closer to some truth, maybe? Or a few steps in another, more magnetic, direction. Spring became a record about the dance itself… the play between the creation of home, the weaving of love, the search for true connection to the earth, the seductive nature of answers… the dusty spring deep in the mind that keeps us sifting.“

If Open to Chance felt moonlit, spectral and spooky, Spring sounds positively auroral, luminous, a brisk early morning walk through lucid daylit dreams, a series of vivid visions in thrall to the dusty New Mexican terrain. By opening themselves to multivalent interpretations, these generous, sun-dappled songs hide nothing. “Bess’s Dance” ends with a tidy summation of the project, a suggestion of how, through the lens of history and nature, Spring collapses ancient and contemporary contexts to push, languorously and gently, against the constraints of time: 

We create great stages where we
act out the borders of desire