Description

Follow up to Eve Adams much loved Metal Bird, released on Basin Rock in 2022.

Astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars Pitchfork

Mood music for moments of solitude, best experienced without distraction The Times

Overwhelmingly effective and ravishingly beautiful The Wire

American Dust is an ode to the beauty of the American Southwest, where vast desert landscapes hold stories both stark and tender. Eve Adams characteristic folk noir weaves a vivid tapestry of love, sacrifice and quiet revelation, conjuring images of dust storms, stray dogs and far off trains.

The high desert of California is a vast and confounding place. Equally inspiring as it is punishing, its a landscape that carries magic in its deep dark nights, holding stories both tender and stark in the coarse layer of dust that settles upon everything. Its long been a source of inspiration for musicians, writers, and painters, each of them adding to the same current, carried forward over time, through hope and hardship and the passing years.

Somewhere out there in that broad and boundless landscape, Eve Adams has been living her own desert life, quietly writing the follow-up to 2021s Metal Bird LP. Where that album sang of liminal space, the dream-like turbulence of Hollywoods golden age, American Dust is far more rooted in traditional storytelling; a eulogy for the American Dream channeled through that sweeping part of the country that holds such power and mystery. Slipping into different and varied costumes throughout its ten songs, it finds Eve not just observing the people around her but stepping into their shoes and peeling back the layers of their quiet lives.

Adams writes from within. A few years ago she moved out there, to the middle of nowhere, finding a slowness that didnt exist in the city, and she knows only too well about the mystical nature of the land and those who live within it. Weaving together themes of grit and romance, American Dust holds its focus on the bittersweet poetry of lives lived in solitude, most notably the women who sustain life at the center of it all. Theres something very radical about domestic life, Adams says of this thread. So many women live their entire lives behind closed doors, completely in the shadows. Within those lives is such sacrifice, devotion, and love. I wanted to honor that: the poetry in the mundane, the longing in the repetition. The way love survives boredom and dust and time.

Eve is joined on American Dust by Canadian musician Bryce Cloghesy, aka Military Genius of Crack Cloud, who plays throughout and also helped produce the album. Musically bold and vivid, its an ambitious and detailed stride forward from whats come before, the scope of the LPs narrative reflected in the radiant sweep of the playing. On top of gentle piano and guitar, gorgeous strings drift through the album, lending the songs a woozy sense of romanticism; a collaboration with Gamaliel Traynor (Cello) and Carolines Oliver Hamilton (Violin).

For all the drama thats coiled around these songs, its the recurring notion of love and hope fighting against everything that holds true throughout American Dust. Musically its lush and vibrant, intimate and cinematic side by side, and always bursting with warmth. But its what it holds in its weary bones that elevates it to something truly special, something more than just a collection of songs penned in the heart of the desert. The characters it speaks of, and from, feel shadowed but wholly real, like theyre bursting to share their stories that have remained hidden for years and years and they allow Eve Adams to grow as a songwriter right in front of our eyes.

The same swirling dust that clung to the covered wagons of my ancestors as they crossed the Great American Desert is the same dust my great-great-grandmother swept off her porch during the Dust Bowl of 1936 in Oklahoma, is the same dust that blows in through the cracks in my windows here in the desert, carrying stories from a time long gone, Eve says, reflecting on the personal narrative that runs through her new album.

Its not just dustits American Dust, the kind that settles into the bones of a family and never leaves. I think about that dust as a symbol of the passage of time. I hope this album will be part of that same current, carrying forward for the next generations of my family to find. Ive been lucky enough to have journals and poetry from my ancestors that documents their lives during times of pure hope and pure hardship. Id like to think of this album as a contribution to that family history.