LAURA GIBSON

- SHARES NEW VIDEO FOR TITLE TRACK 'EMPIRE BUILDER'
- NEW ALBUM OUT APRIL 1ST ON CITY SLANG
- CONFIRMED TO PLAY END OF THE ROAD FESTIVAL
- LONDON & MANCHESTER SHOWS IN APRIL

With her new album ‘Empire Builder’ set for release on April 1st via City Slang, Laura Gibson has shared the title track & accompanying video. She has also added End of the Road to her forthcoming UK dates.
 
Laura presents the video for her album title track, explaining: “I captured this video footage while traveling from Oregon to New York on the Empire Builder; so the music video and the song have existed together since their beginnings. At the time, I was moving to New York to attend graduate school. I had known for a while that I needed some sort of change, a new challenge in my life and work.”
 
“This song captured a moment of utter unknowing, of self-doubt and confliction. The song itself became my means of finding an answer, my way of saying something I couldn’t otherwise express” she continues. “The first few times I performed “Empire Builder”, I felt almost embarrassed. It seemed too simple, too direct and personal. But it seemed to resonate with people, and more importantly, I felt I had been able to communicate something I had been trying and failing to communicate up until that point. It was the charge, and the anchor that allowed me to make the whole record, which shares its name.”
 
The footage was filmed by Laura and edited by Kelly Lyon.
 
Watch the video for ‘Empire Builder’: https://youtu.be/VMamoan2JwA
Embed: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VMamoan2JwA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
Just as Laura had begun to feel settled in New York on March 26, 2015, her apartment building in the Lower East Side blew up from a gas explosion, killing two & injuring many. Laura was unharmed, but lost almost all that she owned and had been working on. All identification, musical instruments, stacks of notebooks, and every word she had written in the past several years was reduced to a pile of rubble. 
 
She spent the next few months rebuilding her life, bouncing between friends’ couches and guest rooms, and finishing her second semester, and all the while rewriting the lyrics she had lost, a recovery made possible by the help and support from hundreds of friends, fans, and strangers.
 
Equally raw and focused, Empire Builder captures a life blown open: an individual mid-transformation. Gibson’s most personal record to date, it marks a huge leap forward as a songwriter, composer and producer.
 
She gathered a stellar band of dear old friends: guitarist/bassist Dave Depper (Death Cab for Cutie, Menomena), drummer/percussionist Dan Hunt (Neko Case), and composer/violinist Peter Broderick. Other contributors include Nate Query of The Decemberists and vocalist Alela Diane. Gibson co-produced the record with John Askew (Neko Case, The Dodos), spending her school breaks in his home studio, and in Broderick’s studio on the Oregon Coast. With Askew’s encouragement, Gibson returned to the recordings soon after the explosion. Having lost her guitar, which she had played on every record and show since the beginning, they decided to keep many of the scratch tracks from the original demos, building around them to create the final album.
 
Within her fiction studies in grad school, Gibson is finding her legs as a storyteller. Amidst trauma, loss and recovery, she rediscovered songwriting as a means of understanding her own life and choices. Empire Builder grapples with independence, womanhood, solitude, connection and aloneness. If Gibson has a thesis, it’s perhaps within the final words of the title track: “Hurry up and lose me / Hurry up and find me again.” With clear-eyed honesty, urgency and warmth, Empire Builder succeeds in capturing the moment between loss and rediscovery.
 
Laura Gibson live dates:
 
Apr 22 BE Brussels - Huis 23@AB [Tickets]
Apr 23 NL Utrecht - Tivoli Vredenburg Cloud [Tickets]
Apr 25 UK Manchester - Soup Kitchen [Tickets]
Apr 26 UK London - Hoxton Bar & Kitchen [Tickets]
Apr 27 FR Paris – Point Ephemere* w/Grant-Lee Phillips [Tickets]
Apr 28 NL Amsterdam - Tuinzaal, Paradiso Noord [Tickets]
Apr 29 NL Nijmegen - Marienburg Church [Tickets]
Apr 30 BE Gent – Trefpunt [Tickets]
May 01 BE Lessines - Roots and Roses Festival [Tickets]
May 02 DE Berlin - Kantine am Berghain [Tickets]
May 03 DE Leipzig - Werk 2 [Tickets]
May 05. AT Graz – Postgarage [Tickets]
May 06 AT Vienna - Haus Der Musik [Tickets]
May 07 CH Dornbirn - Conrad Sohm [Tickets]
Sept 02 – 04 UK End of the Road Festival – Dorset [Tickets]
 
Preorder links:
http://smarturl.it/EmpireBuilder_iTunes
http://smarturl.it/EmpireBuilder_Amazon
http://smarturl.it/EmpireBuilder_Label
 
Other links:
The Cause on Soundcloud
Laura Gibson on Facebook
Laura Gibson on Twitter
www.lauragibsonmusic.comFor more information please contact kate@stereosanctity.co.uk / t. +44 7812 607 230.