Back in August, we indicated there was further new music to come from the Guatemalan-Italian Chiara Angelicola, who hadn’t released anything as Bird Call since the pandemic outbreak put the skids on touring for her previous record, late 2019’s Year of the Dogfish. She broke her silence with ‘Tiny Transistor’, and today returns in earnest with The Life is Extraordinary, a seven-song EP.
In addition to a further five new songs, smack-dab in the middle is Angelicola’s take on Aimee Mann‘s 1999 song ‘Save Me’, written for and used in the much-missed Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. We’re premiering the video for Angelicola’s rendition below, and here’s what she had to say on the EP itself: “Despite the challenges I have faced in the past five years, this record has been nothing less than luminous in my creative life, a lighthouse for healing and moving forward. […] After 20 years of making records, now approaching 40, I feel this work embodies me totally as a creative woman. Becoming a mother requires a shedding of old skin of sorts in order to become a whole and present person for my daughter. […] For this record, I am literally saying that life is extraordinary and our boundless capacity to grow is untethered to our past. I realize the production process felt more spontaneous, organic, and improvisational because of this mental liberty. The Life is Extraordinary: my ode to motherhood, womanhood, and self-empowered creativity.”
The self-released EP is out now.
