Nick Granata, best known as a vocalist and organist of London’s nine-piece folk group Shovel Dance Collective, today announces their debut solo album, My Heart is Running Backwards! A Martial Artist! With a Closed Fist! Woof!, out 24th July via Double Dare. The announcement arrives with a double single, Rabbits! / Birdies!
The accompanying press shares:
Flipping between a music hall jaunt and slow contemplative strings and wandering piano, Rabbits! tarries longingly on scenes in transit; looking out onto the patch quilt landscape with your headphones on and exclaiming at the sight of rabbits, playing twenty questions and guessing Richard and Judy multiple times, getting all out of puff on a long walk with an athletic family, losing your bearings but not caring because you’re with people you love.
Hidden amongst the layered voices in the last track, Birdies!, is a kind of resolution that cuts to the heart of the album’s major dilemma ‘You are not a statue/Not made of marble/Made of goo’. Much of the album is about reckoning with the statue one makes of oneself through the course of childhood, the thing we think we are which cannot stand the inconsistencies and complications of life. But the main bulk of Birdies! pays little heed to that distant revelation. Recorded on a four track tape recorder, Nick lists moments of brightness (a horse running right up to you just to say hello, reading a heartfelt dedication on a bench plaque, a shaft of sunlight illuminating fossils embedded in stone steps), and then repeats them amongst an interrupting refrain that dwells on a myriad of complications (calling into work sick, having WhatsApp for a family, acid reflux).
Granata wrote most of the album at home between 2019 and 2023. It steps away from the traditional material they were learning at the same time as Shovel Dance Collective were finding their feet, taking the values of folk storytelling and turning them on personal subject matter. That grounding in old song works here as a liberating force, a way out of what Granata calls the myth of the singular, entirely original artistic voice. “My Heart… is awash with influence and wears it on its sleeve,” they say, “reaching for the uniqueness of experience and time that exists in contraction to the borrowed nature of everything.”
Granata plays everything on the album: viola, violin, voice, trumpet (sans mouthpiece), guitar, train whistle, tin whistle, saxophone, electric piano, mixed percussion and pump organ.
Double Dare is no stranger to the collective: the label co-released Shovel Dance Collective’s The Water is the Shovel of the Shore in 2022.
The title does the work of a warning. “As the name suggests, My Heart… is undeniably and slightly embarrassingly a feelings record,” Granata says, “gritting its teeth and fighting with the past, only to result in an unintelligible, laughable (but maybe also cryable), wail of ambivalence (woof!).”
My Heart is Running Backwards! A Martial Artist! With a Closed Fist! Woof! (24th July) Double Dare
Pre-Order (Digital/CD/Cassette): https://nickgranata.bandcamp.com/album/my-heart-is-running-backwards-a-martial-artist-with-a-closed-fist-woof
Nick Granata Live Dates
21st June – London, Matchstick Piehouse
3rd September – London, The 100 Club (w/ Širom)
More dates TBA