Margaret Glaspy has announced a new EP set for release this Friday, April 26. Entitled The Sun Doesn’t Think (ATO), it will mark the follow up to last year’s critically acclaimed album Echo The Diamond which drew attention from the likes of The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, among many others.
“While I was on tour for Echo The Diamond, I was writing this EP,” Glaspy says of the origins of the The Sun Doesn’t Think material. “I was inspired by just being around audiences and experiencing their charisma and their stories. It made me want to bring more music to them and release records closer to their inception.” Today she shares the lead track “24/7” and Glaspy says “This song represents my attempt to understand how the threads of my childhood have woven the adult costume that I wear. I started to see that my beliefs about love and life had not evolved since I was a little girl and it had a pretty direct link to my own sense of worry and anxiety.” She adds, “I love being an adult – with it comes the opportunity to connect your own dots.” Listen/share “24/7” here and watch the visualizer here:
Margaret will play the songs off The Sun Doesn’t Think and other fan-favorites on her forthcoming East Coast tour. The dates kick off May 2 at the Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis, MD and conclude at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY on May 31. Along the way she will stop at Levon Helms Studio on May 4 in Woodstock, NY and National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY on May 10. Additionally Glaspy will be playing in Tokyo, Japan in June and today has announced 3 shows in London in September – tickets go on-sale Friday, April 26 at 10am BST here. She will also be playing the Wayne Music Festival in Wayne, PA on June 8 and Pleasantville Music Festival in Pleasantville, NY on July 13. Tickets for her stateside shows are on-sale now and all dates are listed below.
In creating The Sun Doesn’t Think Glaspy embraced the momentum she was feeling on tour, and hit the studio on her own terms. “The simplicity of making this reminded me of why I make music. I took my acoustic guitar into the studio in March, played new songs in front of a microphone, and The Sun Doesn’t Think was born in a couple of days,” she says of the EP, which was engineered by Mark Goodell at Joe’s Garage and mixed and mastered by Jason Richmond of The Kitchen. She drew inspiration from Tom Waits, Kim Gordon and author Neil Gaiman’s “dark but fantastical and surrealist places.” Of her own writing process she stated, “These days I feel my heart and mind transport to other places when I write – these songs came from either the countryside or the deep night in a lonesome city.”
The EP is rounded out by four other songs including “Will You Be My Man” which centers around a heroine in Glaspy’s mind that defies all expectations and “Bathtub” – a song that she says “feels related to the inner dialogue of an artist at times – feeling stumped or challenged, and questioning your own work, ‘I don’t know why I try.”
2023 saw Margaret Glaspy release her third full-length album Echo The Diamond via ATO Records. The LP emerged from a deliberate stripping-away of artifice to reveal life for all its harsh truths and ineffable beauty. Like the precious gem of its title, the result is an object of startling luminosity, one capable of cutting through the most elaborately constructed façades. The albums’ singles “Act Natural,” “Memories,” and “Get Back” saw support from The New York Times, NPR, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, and others. “Act Natural” reached the top 20 at AAA Radio, marking Glaspy’s highest chart position of her career. The album was labeled a “notable release of the week” by both NPR and American Songwriter and Pitchfork included it in their “8 New Albums You Should Listen To” list around release and The New York Times’ Jon Pareles included “Memories” in his in Best Songs of 2023 list noting “Over a waltz of simple guitar chords, Margaret Glaspy blurts out unvarnished grief in a torn voice, bereft yet struggling to go on.”
