Accomplished songwriter Kris Delmhorst is heading back out on tour in support of her highly praised new album, Ghosts in the Garden. Dates begin May 1 in Galway, NY, continue through Maine, Vermont, DC, Brooklyn and wrap up with hometown shows in Northampton and Groton, MA. This is the final leg of a three-part release tour which started in the Midwest in early March and was followed by a West Coast run, with a couple of solo dates in Canada supporting Rose Cousins along the way.
As with the rest of the tour, the Northeast dates will feature the band from the recording of Ghosts: Minnesotan songwriter/producer Erik Koskinen on guitar, Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T, Jeffrey Foucault) on bass and Ray Rizzo (Josh Ritter, Anaïs Mitchell, Amy Helm) on drums. Erik Koskinen will play an opening set in Galway, Bennington, and Waterbury. Jeffrey Foucault, one of several guest singers on the album as well as Delmhorst’s husband, shares the show in Brownfield, ME. Acclaimed Canadian songwriter Rose Cousins, who also provides guest vocals on Ghosts, opens the final four shows and Brooklyn’s own Ana Egge, yet another guest on the album, will also join the bill in Brooklyn.
Ghosts in the Garden marks the first release for Delmhorst since 2020’s Long Day in the Milky Way. The tours for that project were sidelined by the pandemic, so it’s been since 2017’s The Wild that she’s been able to properly launch a new album. “I felt a little nervous bringing this record on the road - it’s a collection of songs that deal intimately with grief, loss, and irrevocable change, and I wasn’t sure how it would be received,” she says. “What I’d hoped for in sharing it live was a sense of connection, a communal deep dive into emotion and vulnerability, and it’s felt like that night after night on this tour. It feels like a really useful antidote to this time of turmoil and distress, just to be in a room full of people willing to soften together, willing to share their humanity.”
Released on March 7th, Ghosts in the Garden, Delmhorst’s 10th album, has received raves from the likes of No Depression, “Delmhorst has created yet another Americana masterpiece”, American Songwriter, “It would be hard to imagine a more compelling set of songs” and Americana Highways “... a grand seduction of a record by an artist who has always been true to her heart and has perfected the art of digging deep to deliver spirited, nourishing compositions with lyrics which do far more than rhyme.”
Listen to Ghosts in the Garden HERE
Ghosts in the Garden is a gorgeous and searching album, a layered, kaleidoscopic meditation on grief, loss, and fate. Inhabiting the songs are a host of vivid spirits made tangible: the departed and the disappeared, sins and their consequences; lost loves, missed chances, and the invisible sorrows that accompany us all. With richly observed details and finely calibrated emotional range, Delmhorst finds the wavelength that illuminates these multitudes. Having summoned them, she doesn’t avert her eyes from her ghosts – or ours – but invites them into an expansive conversation about the ways we’re shaped by loss, and woven together by unseen threads of love.
Read Kris’ In-Depth Ghosts Song By Song in Worcester Magazine HERE
Listen to Kris and band on Radio Heartland out of The Current Studios HERE
Listen to Kris on WPR’s BETA HERE
Watch video for “Won’t Be Long” HERE
The album was tracked live at Great North Sound Society, a studio built into an 18th-century Maine farmhouse that no doubt harbors ghosts of its own, with a core band of Ray Rizzo (Josh Ritter, Anaïs Mitchell) on drums, Jeremy Moses Curtis (Jeffrey Foucault, Booker T) on bass, and Minnesota songwriter Erik Koskinen on guitars. Engineer Sam Kassirer added keys, and Rich Hinman contributed pedal steel. Finally, Delmhorst invited in a luminous host of fellow songwriters to add vocals to the finished tracks. The guests - Anaïs Mitchell, Rose Cousins, Anna Tivel, Ana Egge, Taylor Ashton, Rachel Baiman, Jabe Beyer,and Jeffrey Foucault - lend unique personality and emotional slant to each track, refracting the songs’ light in all directions.
Delmhorst and her band’s tour dates are below. For more info go to KrisDelmhorst.com
5/1 GALWAY NY - COCK ’N’ BULL
5/2 BROWNFIELD ME - STONE MT ARTS CENTER (w Jeffrey Foucault)
5/3 BENNINGTON VT - THE COFFEE BAR
5/4 WATERBURY VT - ZENBARN
5/7 VIENNA VA - JAMMIN JAVA (w Rose Cousins)
5/8 BROOKLYN NY - LITTLEFIELD (w Rose Cousins AND Ana Egge)
5/9 NORTHAMPTON MA - IRON HORSE (w Rose Cousins)
5/10 GROTON MA - GROTON HILL MUSIC CENTER (w Rose Cousins)
ABOUT KRIS DELMHORST
Kris Delmhorst is an American songwriter, singer, instrumentalist, and producer. Over more than 25 years as an independent artist, she has built a body of work characterized by a wide-ranging, genre-agnostic curiosity and constant collaboration. In addition to nine critically acclaimed studio albums, she’s written music for films and TV, contributed as a producer, player, and or/singer to scores of fellow artists’ work, and performed thousands of shows across the US and Europe. Kris Delmhorst lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, the songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, and their daughter.
“bold and brilliant” - Irish Times
“literate and allusive” - Boston Globe
“moody, euphoric and transcendent” - LA Times
“The garden is the now, the living, blooming present. The ghosts are many - all our dead and departed, our lost loves and past mistakes and roads not taken, and our possible futures too - crowding into the moment like they do. There’s a lot of grief in this record, a lot of loss and change. Also abiding love, quiet longing, deep worry, wild joy. I’m so grateful to all of the amazing people who are a part of it.” KD
