Let’s get one thing out of the way: Basia Bulat doesn’t live in a château. The property at the heart of the songwriter’s new studio album is at once her apartment, her jam-space, and the inside of her head. Basia’s Palace is a place festooned with love and memory, and bad wiring; it’s a paradise that comes alive in the wee hours of the night–a time that’s suited to video games and Leonard Cohen records, when you sit in all that richness and take in all the mess we inherit.

Basia’s Palace got its start in 2022. A new home, a new family, a pause: the singer was finally finding time to hear her own thoughts, to think about old stories, to boot up her Nintendo to play Dragon Warrior 4. It brought to mind anecdotes Bulat had heard about Cohen—how he used to do his best writing at three or four a.m., before his kids woke up, when he’d sit and toy with his Casio’s presets. Now it was Bulat sneaking down to play RPGs or to make music on her MacBook, listening for the spirit-world at a time when the veil felt thinnest. The songs she was creating didn’t feel like anything she had recorded before—MIDI soundscapes that floated and gleamed, like hidden levels above (or below) the action.

The album that emerged from all this—that started in dawn-kissed synth instrumentals, lyrics scribbled down in a Hayao Miyazaki notebook—is the softest and most searching of her career.  Co-produced by frequent collaborator Mark Lawson (who worked with her on Tall Tall Shadow and The Garden), and mixed by legendary engineer Tucker Martine (Beth Orton, Neko Case, The National), Basia’s Palace is like a time-travel score, with Bulat akin to Chrono Trigger’s intrepid adventurer, going back into the past to shape the events of the future. After years of releasing records where live performance came first—culminating in 2022’s The Garden, which reimagined some of her best-loved songs with help from a string quartet—the singer-songwriter wanted to express herself in a completely different way, composing with MIDI instead of piano or guitar. She found herself moving through a dreamworld of whispers, synths, and early Eurovision tunes–and Cohen’s I’m Your Man and her great uncle’s gauzy Maryla Rodowicz LPs.

The result feels like an album that was concealed behind the backings of Bulat’s childhood photos—tracks like “My Angel,” where mystery and romance mingle over squelchy synths, drum machine, and a soaring string arrangement by Drew Jurecka (Dua Lipa, Alvvays), or “Laughter,” which takes a quiet garden scene and sees it build to a deafening sublime. “Disco Polo” is a track Bulat’s been threatening to make for years: a folk-song named for a genre of Polish dance music that was beloved by her late father. Meanwhile “Baby,” which took years to finish, makes an elegant dance number out of an all-too-familiar predicament: “Baby, baby, baby,” Basia sings, “I don’t learn!”  At some moments there are shades of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s “Bonnie and Clyde” or Charles Aznavour’s “Emmenez-Moi,” and at others it’s the silicon-shiny sweetness of The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” or Air’s Moon Safari.

Throughout, Bulat pays tribute to the magic of creation and the spellwork of performance. This is the truest location of Basia’s Palace: not just the Mile End jam-space where she recorded much of this LP; not just her home, her family, or her searching spirit. But the moment itself—the one that happens on-stage, or in the instant of creation—when a song leaves Basia’s heart and leaps onto her lips.

From the first moments of Maia Friedman's upcoming album Goodbye Long Winter Shadow,layers of strings, woodwinds, acoustic guitar and Maia's warm anchoring voice blossom as if to say “you are here.” The lush arrangements and sage lyricism are an enveloping statement of intent. They carry the devotion to nature Friedman fostered growing up in California’s Sierra Nevada with a new mother’s exploration of time and transformation. Friedman spent months developing the language of the album, pursuing the music she envisioned with characteristic patience. Produced with Philip Weinrobe (AdrianneLenker, Florist) and Oliver Hill (Magdalena Bay, Helado Negro), the result is chamber pop abounding with melodic intimacy, a world where instruments bob and weave around the heart-stopping clarity of Friedman’s voice.

Though 2022’s acclaimed debut Under the New Light was the first album under her name, the California-born, New York-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has honed her sound for years as a member of both Dirty Projectors and Coco, the shared project of Friedman, Hill and Dan Molad. Where her debut was built from collaborative improvisation,Goodbye Long Winter Shadow is a collection of songs inthe classic sense. Intimate instrumentals punctuate its running time and emphasize the sonic palette of the orchestral arrangements. Friedman’s lyricism and writing here is timeless, tightly composed and interspersed with surprising harmonic turns. If not for the heightened quality of its recording by Weinrobe, it might have been made decades ago; it’s Nico’s Chelsea Girl for today.

Basia Bulat Website
Maia Friedman Website

Photo Credit: Richmond Lam