American singer-songwriter Alela Diane has just shared her intensely personal new single, ‘Camellia’ heralding the artist’s eagerly awaited sixth studio album, Looking Glass, which is due for release on October 14 through Naïve.
‘Looking Glass’ explores ideas of identity and belonging, and where we choose to seek shelter in current times. The original definition of “looking glass,” Diane notes, is “mirror,” but after Lewis Carroll published the novel Through the Looking Glass in 1871, the term took on a second meaning: “the opposite of what is normal or expected.”
“In the context of the album,” Alela Diane says, “Looking Glass refers to both meanings. It is a portal to past and future, and a reflection on all that lies between.”
It follows 2018’s celebrated album, Cusp and the reissue of Alela’s startling debut, The Pirate’s Gospel, which has sold over 100,000 copies. The album announcement arrives alongside emotive single, ‘Camellia’, written about Alela’s intense brush with death whilst giving birth to her youngest daughter in 2017. The song reflects her deep inner monologues and euphoric triumph over darkness in the chorus. Listen to ‘Camellia’ here:
Diane’s first new album in more than four years, Looking Glass, also includes the recently released single, ‘Howling Wind and is highlighted by emotive new songs such as ‘Paloma‘ and ‘When We Believed‘. The Guardian described Diane’s music like “campfire pipe dreams filled with picket fences, desert sands and paths leading back to you.”
Alela Diane grew up in the winding rivers and golden hillsides of Nevada City, California where she listened to her parents harmonise bluegrass songs in the kitchen as a child. She moved to San Francisco at age 19 and began writing her own songs, making her recorded debut with 2004’s acclaimed The Pirate’s Gospel. This was followed by a string of increasingly well received albums, supported by extensive touring through North America, Europe, and beyond.
Her latest album was made during a time of great personal transition for Diane, recorded during the same weeks that she and her family were selling the Portland, Oregon house she bought at the age of 26 from music royalties. It was in that home that she’d been married, divorced, and married again, and become the mother of two children. The emotional and logistical chaos of that moment – along with historic wildfires raging through the Pacific Northwest, and more – fuels Looking Glass, which touches often on the various meanings of home, past and present.
Now, with her cathartic and ethereal sixth studio album, Looking Glass, Diane explores how the past is always with us – a source of sadness sometimes, but also of solace, a kind of permanent foundation on which we all walk into the rest of our lives. Haunting new songs like ‘Dream A River’ resonate with a characteristic weaving of lightness and dark, balancing intensely personal lyrics of imagined catastrophe with a signature shot of bittersweet hope- a possibility that something better might emerge from the ashes.
Diane will mark the arrival of Looking Glass with a busy live schedule, including European headline dates and a sold-out show at London’s St Matthias Church on October 20. North American dates will be announced soon. For more details see here: aleladiane.com/tour.
ALELA DIANE
ON TOUR 2022
OCTOBER
15 – Berlin, Germany – silent green Kulturquartier
18 – Paris, France – Cafe de la Danse
20 – London, United Kingdom – St. Matthias Church (SOLD OUT)
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