Jordaan Mason & Their Orchestra – “No More Metaphor”

The Toronto musician Jordaan Mason has been making roiling, experimental folk songs for just about two decades now. Today, they’re announcing a new album called Rewrite The Words Again, their first full-length in four years following 2018’s Earth To Ursa Major. It’s their first album billed as Jordaan Mason & Their Orchestra, and Mason began to piece it together a couple years ago after reaching out to the Berlin musician Marlene Bellissimo. That collaboration led Mason to expand their project, hence the Orchestra designation, and Rewrite The Words Again also features contributions from Ryan Doyle, Diane Cluck, AJJ’s Sean Bonnette, and more.

“I started going through all these old pieces of writing that I had never finished. It grew from those, and then newer writing started getting added into it, responding to the old writing,” Mason said of the new album. “[Bellissimo] offered to be the Van Dyke Parks to my Joanna Newsom. I was like, how can I say no to that? “I love the arrangements on her records so much. We have a very similar aesthetic and set of sounds that we’re interested in.”

The album’s lead single “No More Metaphor” is quivering and theatrical, unspooling over seven minutes while chronicling the breakdown of a relationship in traumatic detail. Check it out below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “No More Metaphor”
02 “The City We Loved In”
03 “Another Storm”
04 “Colour Memory”
05 “Play The Harp Badly”
06 “Spiderwebhead”
07 “Hot Burning Stove”
08 “Amsterdam”
09 “Still Alive, Singing”
10 “Two Oceans”
11 “Temporary/Wild”
12 “Rewrite The Words Again”
13 “No More Trauma”

Rewrite The Words Again is out 10/21 via Unelectric Arts. Pre-order it here.