KR-51

Announce European Tour, Bonnaroo and US Dates

Here is the first single from KR-51- “The Lake”. Feel free to download, share, and enjoy:

KR-51

Clare and the Reasons have announced the release date of their third record, KR-51, available July 10th in North America (Frog Stand) and July 4th in Japan (P-Vine). KR-51, created in Berlin, follows the band’s critically acclaimed 2009 release, Arrow, and their debut album, The Movie, which included collaborations by Sufjan Stevens and Van Dyke Parks. In anticipation of the KR-51 release and a forthcoming tour, the band has debuted their first single “The Lake.” Clare and the Reasons will play in NYC twice next week before embarking on a set of European dates, and their first ever appearance at Bonnaroo this summer.

Clare and the Reasons call Brooklyn home, but after touring around the world extensively with Van Dyke Parks, My Brightest Diamond, and on their own, they needed a new setting – one that would make them see and hear differently. For eight months in 2011 they lived in an apartment on Berlin’s Bergstrasse, on the western edges of what used to be the East. They got a 1968 Schwalbe moped – model KR-51 – and sped around the city at a velocity the congested New York streets would have prohibited. While riding under the vast skies of Berlin, the city a blurred filmstrip of cobblestones, trees, and graffiti, they dreamed up the sounds of this new record. After months of writing under the influence of Berlin they packed up a van and drove to Haldern-Rees, a little German village, to record KR-51. In Oct-Nov of 2011, they recorded for long hours, in between bicycling in and around cow fields, under an unimaginable number of stars.

The band sunk themselves into a city of many histories, a city of concrete boxes and fluted columns. Those contrasts, at times stark and streamlined, at times grandly lush, show up in the 11 songs on KR-51. They carry the meticulous orchestration and innovative songwriting Clare and the Reasons are known for, while also carrying a little more sorrow, a lot more distorted guitar, and a little more darkness of heart. Clare studied the way Lotte Lenya delivered so convincingly, and you may hear the adventurous attitude of early Kate Bush in Clare’s writing. The great James McAlister (Sufjan Stevens) played drums on the album, filling it with crunch and bang, driving the record. In a world of sound banks and sequencers, an orchestra made up of members of the Orchestre de Paris materialized, and was recorded live in Paris, something Clare and the Reasons consider a miracle.

Clare and the Reasons’ third album, KR-51, will be released July 10th on Frog Stand in North America, and July 4th on P-vine in Japan.

This album is their Berlin.

Clare and the Reasons In Concert:

4/29 – Brooklyn, NY – Jalopy – with Geoff Muldaur
5/02 – New York, NY – Joe’s Pub, Happy Ending Music & Reading Series
5/10 – Berlin, Germany – House of World Cultures
5/12 – Ghent, Belgium – Handelsbeurs
5/16 – Köln, Germany – King Georg
5/17 – Amsterdam, The Netherlands – De Balie, Indiestad
6/06 – Asheville, NC – Lexington Avenue Brewery
6/07-09 – Manchester, TN – Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival
6/10 – Richmond, VA – Gallery 5

For more show info, click here

Feel free to share, download, and listen!

“One of the greatest impulses is to hurry. It’s to get ahead. It’s to be first. It’s even more about not being last that brings about the hurrying. It’s about needing to says things to people before they just eat the hell away at you, before they begin to rot you out from the insides to the point where if someone poked you in your chest, they’d pull out a rancid smelling thumb. It’s this urge to get to some kind of proverbial finish line and then ask whatever the next questions are when anyone reaches such a dumb place. It’s a place that is quickly stripped of all meaning because it’s not where anything is really rewarded or where there is anything culminating. It’s just another day and you’ve hurried yourself off to a sigh and a night’s sleep, same as any other night…”

Read more….

Join them as they perform songs from their forthcoming album:

Monday, February 27th – Rockwood 2
Friday, March 2nd – Barbès
Monday, March 5th – Rockwood 2

For more info, click here

Communion, the brainchild of Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett, his close ally Kevin Jones, and renowned producer Ian Grimble, formed in London in 2006 and has become the U.K.’s most revered live music promotions team. This new monthly show at Public Assembly, part of its hotly anticipated move into the U.S, features a different lineup each month and offers emerging, developing and established artists a creative platform to perform in an environment that embraces collaboration and mutual support.

Clare and the Reasons will be joined by Natalia Zukerman, Spirit Family Reunion, Levi Stephens, and Sydney Wayser. Doors open at 6PM.

For more info visit our shows page.

We’re excited to announce that Josh Mease’s “Days Like This” will be featured on this season’s finale of “Nurse Jackie” – the one feature in the closing scene of the episode. The show will air this coming Monday, June 20th, at 10PM. Be sure to tune in!

Also appearing are Shara Worden (from My Brightest Diamond), Mustafa Ziyalan, and Rob Moose.