The Magic Lantern, new album and UK tour, October and November 2024.
Friday, September 13, 2024
Singer-songwriter and composer Jamie Doe, aka The Magic Lantern will release his fifth album "To Everything A Season" on 11th October 2024 and will be touring the UK in October & November.
We have received the following press release;
The Magic Lantern Announces New Album To Everything A Season
(11th October 2024, Hectic Eclectic / La Buissonne)
& UK Tour (October-November)
NEW SINGLE ‘LOOPS’ OUT NOW
WATCH VIDEO BELOW
The Magic Lantern - Loops (Official)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5HxsG25vOY
To Everything A Season is the unashamedly emotional fifth album from The Magic Lantern, the musical moniker of singer-songwriter and composer Jamie Doe, an artist blurring the boundaries between folk, jazz and contemporary music.
Written in the months following his daughter’s birth and his father’s death six weeks later, To Everything A Season crackles with the quiet intensity of a family’s rawest and most intimate moments. Describing their brief meeting in a dementia nursing home Doe says: “In that cathartic moment I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward. These songs are my attempt to make sense of this incredible time where both ends of the circle of life touched.”
On new single ‘Loops’ Doe expands on the intensely emotional experience of taking his three-week-old daughter to meet his dying father in the nursing home, exactly as he was taken by his father to meet his grandfather. “In that cathartic moment, one loop closed and another opened.”
‘Loops’ was written whilst Doe held his daughter in one hand and played piano in the other, with the brooding, stripped back arrangement featuring a devastating flugelhorn solo by ECM’s Matthieu Michel.
The video for ‘Loops’ is part of a 45-minute film Doe is creating to accompany To Everything A Season, with the film being broken into chapters representing each album track, described by Doe as “not a narrative film nor a series of mini-music videos, but a visual tone poem to accompany the music.” On the ‘chapter’ for ‘Loops’ Doe is aged to look like his father emphasising the loops of time explored within the song.
To Everything A Season was recorded live at the famous La Buissonne studio in France over a four-day period, and captures a vivid emotional immediacy, the richness of the ensemble arrangements and spirited improvisation belying the devastating songwriting. Working with a septet drawn from London’s thriving jazz scene.
To Everything A Season is both dreamy and direct, making use of the space around Doe’s arresting voice to emphasis it’s emotional weight. Whilst lyrically, To Everything A Season is The Magic Lantern’s most powerful and accomplished achievement, a mature work that establishes Doe as one of the most confident lyricists writing today. With themes of loops and cycles threaded through the album, the lyrics draws on references as diverse as the Bible, the records of John Coltrane and the helix structure of DNA.
TRACKLIST:
Trembling
Two in One
Loops
Hear Me
Data Points
Love’s A Traitor
Home
Sweetheart
Joy Is A Choice
Epilogue (trembling)
Born in Australia, before moving to the UK at twelve years old, Jamie Doe adopted the stage name of The Magic Lantern and began writing songs while studying philosophy in Bristol. He lives in London and has released four full length albums and two EPs in addition to a compilation of other artists versions of his songs for the male suicide prevention charity CALM. He has toured the UK, Europe and Australia with acts as diverse as folk singer This is The Kit, Sam Lee, and Alabaster Deplume. He is a Professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and teaches on the songwriting faculty at the Institute for Contemporary Music Performance.
The Magic Lantern has received praise from numerous publications including The Guardian, Songlines and Folk Radio UK and received huge radio support from the likes of BBC Radio 1’s Huw Stephens, BBC 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne, Guy Garvey and Tom Robinson, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction and Night Track, BBC Radio 2’s Mark Radcliffe, Bob Harris and Jamie Cullum who recently played ‘Home’ from To Everything A Season saying “This is my favourite thing out at the moment. I’ve loved all the releases so far, but this brand-new song ‘Home’ is so good. I’ve listened to this 100 times in the last week I swear.”
The Magic Lantern will be touring To Everything A Season in October-November.
TOUR:
20/10 – Peggy’s Skylight, Nottingham
22/10 – Folklore Rooms, Brighton
23/10 – The Cornish Bank, Falmouth
24/10 – The Barrel House, Totnes
25/10 – The Club Cinema, Bristol
27/10 – The Prince Albert, Stroud
28/10 – The Engine Rooms, North Shields
29/10 – The Glad Café, Glasgow
30/10 – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
01/11 – The Bookshop, Wigtown
02/11 – Letham Village Hall, Letham, Fife
07/11 – The Lighthouse, Deal
08/11 – Round Chapel, London
14/11 – HydeAway, Frome
25/11 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
26/11 – Café #9, Sheffield
Ticket links via http://www.the-magic-lantern.co.uk/gigs
‘Loops’ is out now on all digital streaming platforms with the video available to watch on YouTube. The album To Everything A Season follows on 11 October via Hectic Eclectic / La Buissonne Records.
PRESS QUOTES:
“Really original sounding music, especially if you’re a jazz listener, you can really get inside the musical intricacies of that but also just enjoy it as just a joyous beautiful piece of music.” Jamie Cullum (BBC Radio 2)
“It’s beautiful and I love it.” Guy Garvey (BBC 6 Music)
“Devastating. One of my favourite artists of recent years” Tom Robinson (BBC 6 Music)
“It’s an overwhelming weight and a dazzling thing of beauty, all at once bringing pain and joy, passion and euphoria.” Atwood Magazine
“Just one of those artists who sounds totally like himself.” Jamie Cullum
“Ooh that’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Huw Stephens, BBC Radio 1
https://the-magic-lantern.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/TheMagicLantern
https://www.instagram.com/jamiedoe_themagiclantern/