For her sixth album, Jennifer Castle‘s ‘Monarch Season‘ takes its name from a natural seasonal wonder – the migration of Monarch Butterflies south to California and Mexico for the winter, some travelling as far as 3000 miles, stopping along the way looking for nectar to continue their journey. An estimated 2000 stop each year along Lake Erie’s shores which also plays its part in this album as it has done in her own life and family history. Her last album, Angels of Death, was recorded in a 19th-century church near the shores of Lake Erie where her family also lived and experienced a constellation of losses, struggles and hard-won growth. While that album was a sublime meditation on mortality and memory, ghosts and grief, ‘Monarch Season’ is suffused by the moon and the complexities of individuality…
I had forgotten, somehow, that moonlight is the reflection of sunlight. 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.
Jennifer Castle
The album is set for release on 20 November via Paradise of Bachelors who tell us this is, in the most literal sense of the word, her first 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.)
Ahead of the album’s release, Jennifer has shared an animated video for ‘Justice’.
The duality of being heartbroken and hopeful at once unfolds from my heart into a continuum. Even in the broken place where I have only questions and fists, there is another, more powerful place, where I have hope and courage. Thrust upon many mothers is the assumption we can find hope at all costs, in any condition, even when great injustices have occurred. The world looks to mothers as a symbol of hope and strength. This song is by them, for them. And for all the people, young or old, who might need it.
Jennifer Castle
The animation is by Jesi Jordan who described the animation as being “about the symbiotic relationship humans have with earth and about a mother’s journey to seek justice for her child“, that symbiotic relationship to earth and nature reinforced with field recordings of birds and insects as it plays out.
Pre-Order Monarch Season via Bandcamp (out 20 November): https://jennifercastle.bandcamp.com/album/monarch-season
Photo Credit: Darryl D