John Grant / Wednesday 30th January 2019 / Leeds O2 Academy

SUPER Friendz Presents
John Grant
Wednesday 30th January 2019
O2 Academy Leeds
7pm
14+
£25

On sale Friday 7th September at 10am from DICE - UK, USA & France, SEE Tickets, Crash Records and Jumbo Records

Exactly
three years since the release of his last solo LP, JOHN GRANT returns
with his new album Love Is Magic, released 12th October via Bella Union,
and available to preorder here. Grant has shared a lyric video for the
first single and title track, directed by Kieran Evans, which is
streaming now, and unveiled a trailer for the album, which can be viewed
now.

“Each record I make is more of an amalgamation of who I
am,” says John Grant. “The more I do this, the more I trust myself, and
the closer I get to making what I imagine in my head.”

Even
when the Michigan-born man released his debut solo album Queen Of
Denmark in 2010, Grant laced sumptuous soft-rock ballads with an array
of spacey, wistful synthesizer sounds, increasingly adding taut, fizzing
sequencers, nu-synth-disco settings and icy soundscapes to the mix on
2013’s Pale Green Ghosts and 2015’s Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. Now,
with his fourth solo album Love Is Magic, Grant continues to evolve,
creating his most electronic record yet, in collaboration with Benge
(Ben Edwards), analogue synth expert/collector and a member of
electronic trio Wrangler, Grant’s collaborators earlier this year under
the collective name of Creep Show on the album Mr Dynamite.

Produced
by Grant (together with Benge and Paul Alexander), and engineered by
Benge at his Cornish studio, the diamond-hard, diamond-gleaming Love Is
Magic, “is closer still to how I’ve always wanted my records to sound,
but I didn’t know how to go about it,” Grant says. Already mentioned
above, he also called on bassist Paul Alexander of Denton, Texas
maestros Midlake, renewing a working relationship that began on Queen Of
Denmark. “Paul trained in music theory at UNT in Denton, Texas with an
emphasis in Jazz and I knew he would come up with beautiful harmonies,
so I unleashed him on the backing vocals,” Grant enthuses. “He comes up
with interesting angles rather than the obvious and also plays some of
the best bass lines I’ve ever heard.”

Besides the quest for
sound, “the lyrics, of course, continue to be very important to me,”
says John. “They’re just snapshots of everyday life where myriad moods
and every sort of horrible and hilarious occurrence one can imagine mix
with the pedestrian resulting in the absurdity and beauty of life.”

Anyone
familiar with Grant’s story will recognise his battles - with addiction
and health, with trusting love and relationships. From this turbulence
he’s forged another riveting collection of often brutal diatribes and
confessionals, where humour, fear, anxiety and anger overlap as Grant,
with trademark candour, figuratively exposes the machinations of his
saturated brain. It’s epitomised by the album’s brilliant opener
‘Metamorphosis’, almost as if his warring psyches are facing up to one
another, as impervious synth-pop and brain-on-fire imagery melts into
dream-ballad introspection and back to synth-backed mania.

The
human mind is further discombobulated by the concept of love – we crave
it, obsess over it, and are invariably traumatised by it, as the album’s
title track explores. “Love’s a shitshow that requires work, it’s not
all lollipops and rainbows and ’67 Dodge Dart Hemis and STDs and
macaroni and cheese and John Carpenter. But nothing can distract from
the fact that, in spite of it all, love is still magic.”

The
magic of love also pervades two gorgeous, magisterial ballads toward the
end of the album: ‘Is He Strange’ and ‘The Common Snipe’ - referring to
the wader bird that makes a unique ‘bleating’ sound by rubbing its tail
feathers together: “it’s about truly seeing another human being and not
projecting onto them what you want them to be” says Grant.

In
the same elegant, eloquent fashion, the album’s heartbreaking finale
‘Touch & Go’ is another kind of love story, centred around Chelsea
Manning, the former US soldier turned WikiLeaks activist who
transitioned to a woman while in prison. “I was very intrigued by her
incredible story,” says Grant. “What kind of strength does it take to
survive something like that while being decried as a traitor and a
pervert for whom death is too good”.

There’s much else to tell
about Grant: how the demise of his first band The Czars led him to
abandon music for five years before an instantly acclaimed solo career,
chart success (Grey Tickles… went Top Five in the UK) and a Best
International Male Solo Artist nomination at the 2014 BRITS alongside
Eminem and Justin Timberlake. Sinead O’Connor and Tracey Thorn have
guested on Grant’s records, he’s sung live with Alison Goldfrapp and
Kylie Minogue, performed at the 2017 Songs Of Scott Walker (1967-70) BBC
Prom, and co-written/sung on Hercules & Love Affair and Robbie
Williams albums. Last Autumn he recorded the “Kindling” duet with Elbow
then went on to tour with them this Spring. His music has been used in
films such as Andrew Haigh’s drama Weekend and Daisy Asquith’s Queerama.
In 2016, he fronted BBC Radio 4's Reimagining The City, taking
listeners around Reykjavik, where Grant has lived since 2012; in April
2017 he curated North Atlantic Flux: Sounds from Smoky Bay in Hull,
showcasing thrilling and innovative musicians from Scandinavia and
Iceland. But that is the past, just as Grant’s autobiography, for
publishers Little, Brown, is the future. The present is Love Is Magic,
the latest installment in Grant’s astonishing story.

Love Is Magic is released 12th October via Bella Union in the UK/Europe and
Partisan in the US. Album artwork and tracklisting below: