Castle, Jennifer: Monarch Season LP

Sorry, exempt from sale.

Jennifer Castle's sixth full-length record, the moon-suffused Monarch Season – an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake butterfly – stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper "solo" album, performed alone in her coastal kitchen, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie, entirely without human accompaniment (though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout). The first-pressing also includes a songbook of sheet music to every song and inner sleeve with lyrics. "I had forgotten, somehow, that moonlight is the reflection of sunlight," Castle explains. "The moon is so iconic, it had become its own celebrity to me. Sometimes individualization is like that. We are praised to become our own identity – singular shining orbs. This record is a reminder to cherish openly that which reflects off and onto me. A reminder that stone orbs only become meaningful moons when they experience the gravity and light of others."