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VIRGINIA SONGWRITER DEVON SPROULE RETURNS WITH NEW CD ¡DON’T HURRY FOR HEAVEN! FROM BLACK HEN MUSIC ON MARCH 16 SPECIAL GUESTS ON NEW ALBUM INCLUDE JESSE WINCHESTERAND BJ COLE VANCOUVER, BC – Black Hen Records announces a March 16 release date for Virginia-based singer/songwriter Devon Sproule’s new CD, ¡Don’t Hurry for Heaven!, distributed in the U.S. by Burnside Distribution. The album includes special guest appearances by Jesse Winchester, who sings vocals on the opening track, as well as British all-star BJ Cole, who plays his signature pedal steel guitar throughout. Produced by Devon’s husband Paul Curreri, who also plays various instruments on the album, ¡Don’t Hurry for Heaven! was recorded, for the most part, in England and is the product of her spending much of the last two years touring abroad. Since Curreri was about to cross the pond for his own European tour, he flew over three days early and under his direction, the group tracked eight songs at Far Heath Studios in Northamptonshire. From there, Curreri brought the tracks back to the couple’s home studio in Virginia and completed them. “Last year was a good one, and full of adventures,” says Sproule. “After a whole summer of festivals in the UK, my band was feeling great. It would’ve been a shame not to capture something from that time, to let that phase of our playing evaporate into the next. So we booked this studio out in the country.” Continuing in the tradition of her previous works, ¡Don’t Hurry for Heaven! sports a variety of sonic influences: the title track -- a tipsy, twangy, spousal nudge -- wears a cowboy boot on one foot, and another on its head. On the bouncy opener, “Ain’t that the Way,” Devon sings with one of her heroes, the great Jesse Winchester. Sproule and Curreri even duet on a left-field, desert-bluesy version of Black Uhuru’s “Sponji Reggae.” At the record’s thematic heart is a young woman longing for the daily hiccups of a balanced home (“On a drive, nowhere going, / Gravel popping, tape deck whirring, / Happy couple talk a back road, / Face a thistle with a backhoe”), even while lifelong dreams are quite literally coming true around her. The songs are about her friends, family, herself, her husband — or at least versions of them seen through the lens of geographical distance. But these character sketches ring bona fide; these people seem familiar. “I had a river growing up. I had a pond. / I had barely a secret. And now I have none.” Sproule roots for the home team, and she’s telling everybody. Sproule’s domestic leanings, youthfulness, and romantic sense of humor are deepened by a hurling undercurrent of musical ambition and multi-genre awareness. The album’s solo, jazz-infused closer, “A Picture of Us in the Garden,” signs off with, “Honey, how are we supposed to ever have us a family / when the business won’t give us a buck? / I guess it’s lucky I’m still pretty young.” Perhaps it’s her effortless delivery of the deceptively complex melody, or her charmingly badass guitar work, or the economic poetics of her pleading, but the song throws into relief what lies at the root of all of these compositions -- an infectious vitality, a desire to push forward while continuing to love what got you this far. Sproule's previous effort, Keep Your Silver Shined (2007), was called “The sexiest, sultriest southern album since Lucinda’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” by Paste Magazine and featured singing from fellow-Virginian Mary Chapin Carpenter. Supporting the record, Sproule toured with Woodstock legend Richie Havens, Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner, and supported back-to-back nights in London with Lucinda Williams herself. Sproule’s breakout record, Upstate Songs, was included in Rolling Stone's Critics Top Albums of 2003. The magazine also wrote: “Sproule’s vocal and lyrical beauty is unmatched.” In December 2009 at New York's Lincoln Center, Sproule was awarded the prestigious Sammy Cahn Award for her lyric writing. She was the first American to grace the cover of fRoots magazine in the new millennium, and her appearance on England’s trend-setting TV show, Later...With Jools Holland cocked the ears of fans and industry alike, informing them that yes, her surname does indeed rhyme with “rock ‘n roll.” |
