Django Haskins' dark evocative "So It Is Ever" from the album "Shadowlawn"

From the onset Django Haskins' So It Is Ever paints dark imagery over a kind of down home roots rock meets porch psych folk blues. The beautiful melodies both vocally and musically offset the dark center and the result take your mind away from whatever crushing weight is on your shoulders. So It Is Ever is from the trippily narcotic SHADOWLAWN album (see below).

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Robb Donker

PRESS NOTES:

A songwriter based in North Carolina, Django Haskins has fronted the pop-noir band, The Old Ceremony, since 2004. He also forms one half of the psych-folk duo Au Pair with the Jayhawks' Gary Louris. He has toured. He has been written about. In 2016 he received the NC Arts Council's Artist Grant in recognition of his extensive creative exertions. He has been a part of the traveling circus known as Big Star's Third since its inception in 2011. He has released a dozen albums of his songs in various guises.

SHADOWLAWN is his first solo record in 17 years. It began as a series of experimental recordings in his newly built studio, and eventually evolved into a kind of late-summer song cycle full of meditations on death, love, fear, wanderlust, and exploration of interior worlds. The 1966 Nancy Sinatra recording of "Bang Bang" and Angelo Badalamente's work with David Lynch provided sonic touchstones for the album, with their extensive use of negative space and simultaneously lush and spare atmospheres. As twenty-some songs were whittled down to eleven, banjo and baritone guitar alternated with piano in accompanying the unusually exposed vocals, leaving plenty of space for listeners to fill in the spaces with their own imagination.