Juanita Stein has announced an Australia / New Zealand tour for this February & March. The Howling Bells front woman turned solo artist, who has just released her brilliant new album, Until The Lights Fade, via Nude Records, follows a summer of festivals including Latitude and Green Man and stadium shows with the Killers, with a busy touring schedule through end of 2018. Stein releases her latest single to be taken from the album, Easy Street, to coincide with the dates.
Says Stein of the song, “Easy Street was written very immediately. Everything about it felt intuitive and direct. Touring for the last couple years has given some insight into people and their situations. You’re clocking up some good miles across various cities and countries, you see people getting by, doing what they can, being inventive with their realities. Hope/desperation isn’t limited to geography, everyone’s looking for an easy way out, essentially. This song is about someone running from their reality and trying to find a better life for themselves.”
Juanita Stein will support Bryan Ferry on dates in his Australia and New Zealand while adding headline side shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland.
JUANITA STEIN
Australia / New Zealand 2019
Tuesday 5th March | TSB Bank Center | Wellington (supporting Bryan Ferry)
Wednesday 6th March | Whammy Bar | Auckland*
Thursday 7th March | Spark Arena | Auckland (supporting Bryan Ferry)
Tickets for the Bryan Ferry shows are available now from Ticketmaster.
*Tickets for the Whammy Bar show are available from UnderTheRadar.
Press Release:
Juanita Stein’s second solo album arrives less than a year after her first, ‘America’, saw her exploring the iconography and cultural landscapes of a country that had always fascinated her from afar. Yet, while ’Until The Lights Fade’ is cut from the same musical cloth as its predecessor – the crepuscular twang of bar-room guitars, the keening romanticism of its melodies, the sparseness and simplicity of its arrangements – the album’s ten songs are concerned with thoughts, feelings, stories and characters rooted far closer to home.
“I feel like the two albums are different sides of the same coin,” Stein explains. “If ‘America’ was the starting point of a journey – the musical equivalent of me spreading my wings, but also treading carefully, trying to figure myself out having come from such an intense period of camaraderie in the band – then this record is me starting to gain a bit more traction, feeling more confident in where I’m coming from and what it is I’m doing.”
When the opportunity arose late last year to spend a week in Austin, Texas with the producer Stuart Sikes (Cat Power, White Stripes, Loretta Lynn), Stein explains, “I just grabbed it. When you reach a certain point in life and moments like that appear, you have to go with it. Up til now, everything I’ve done has always been planned and laboured over, but this album was very impromptu, very spur of the moment – a couple of the musicians I was working with I had only met for the first time that week. It was like nothing I’d ever done before.”
This more spur of the moment approach also enabled the late inclusion on the album of Forgiver. Much like the week Juanita Stein spent in Austin, the song – recorded during the downtime between shows in The Killers’ mobile studio – was another of those serendipitous moments that Stein felt compelled to make the most of, and the swaggering, streetwise end result once again validates those instincts.
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