After keeping busy last year with solo singles and a collaborative LP with Hamilton Leithauser, Rostam Batmanglij has lifted the curtain on his first full-length as a solo artist.
Titled Half-Light, the record will arrive September 8 through Nonesuch. A press release reveals that all 15 tracks were written, produced and performed by Rostam in his Los Angeles home studio. Two features also come from Kelly Zutrau and Angel Deradoorian.
In a statement, Rostam also went in-depth on the meaning behind the record's title:
It wasn't until I had almost finished this album and was trying to decide what I should call it that I took the time to look up the word 'half-light'...That lyric, and a large part of that song Half-Light, had come to me in a stream of consciousness sitting in front of a piano years ago, captured in a voice memo on my phone. I had never stopped to figure out what that word meant exactly. But when I read its definition, and found that it had a double meaning — that it referred to both dawn and dusk — I started to think of how those times of day are part of so many lyrics on this album.
I was also struck by the fact that it was a word with a double meaning. That felt important to this record. It made me think back to a friend in Japan who told me that the word 'double' was becoming more and more popular than 'half' for people to describe their split ethnicities. Any person growing up in America with immigrant parents experiences this dichotomy, of feeling both double and half. It's something a lot of us who identify as queer experienced growing up as well, slipping between straight and gay worlds, code-switching. I say experienced in the past tense because I don't know that that's the experience today's kids will have. Things are changing.
Read through the tracklist for Half-Light and hear "Bike Dream" in the player below.
Half-Light:
1. Sumer
2. Bike Dream
3. Half-Light (ft. Kelly Zutrau)
4. Thatch Snow
5. Wood
6. Never Going To Catch Me
7. Don't Let It Get To You
8. I Will See You Again
9. Hold You (ft. Angel Deradoorian)
10. When
11. Rudy
12. Warning Intruders
13. EOS
14. Gwan
15. Don't Let It Get To You (Reprise)
Titled Half-Light, the record will arrive September 8 through Nonesuch. A press release reveals that all 15 tracks were written, produced and performed by Rostam in his Los Angeles home studio. Two features also come from Kelly Zutrau and Angel Deradoorian.
In a statement, Rostam also went in-depth on the meaning behind the record's title:
It wasn't until I had almost finished this album and was trying to decide what I should call it that I took the time to look up the word 'half-light'...That lyric, and a large part of that song Half-Light, had come to me in a stream of consciousness sitting in front of a piano years ago, captured in a voice memo on my phone. I had never stopped to figure out what that word meant exactly. But when I read its definition, and found that it had a double meaning — that it referred to both dawn and dusk — I started to think of how those times of day are part of so many lyrics on this album.
I was also struck by the fact that it was a word with a double meaning. That felt important to this record. It made me think back to a friend in Japan who told me that the word 'double' was becoming more and more popular than 'half' for people to describe their split ethnicities. Any person growing up in America with immigrant parents experiences this dichotomy, of feeling both double and half. It's something a lot of us who identify as queer experienced growing up as well, slipping between straight and gay worlds, code-switching. I say experienced in the past tense because I don't know that that's the experience today's kids will have. Things are changing.
Read through the tracklist for Half-Light and hear "Bike Dream" in the player below.
Half-Light:
1. Sumer
2. Bike Dream
3. Half-Light (ft. Kelly Zutrau)
4. Thatch Snow
5. Wood
6. Never Going To Catch Me
7. Don't Let It Get To You
8. I Will See You Again
9. Hold You (ft. Angel Deradoorian)
10. When
11. Rudy
12. Warning Intruders
13. EOS
14. Gwan
15. Don't Let It Get To You (Reprise)