<h1>ADVANCE TICKETS REQUIRED</h1>purchase tickets at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://undertowshows.com/products/new-orleans-la-july-3">https://undertowshows.com/products/new-orleans-la-july-3</a>door at 7performance at 8Links<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.mariataylormusic.com/">Official Website</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.instagram.com/mariataylor1111">Instagram</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.facebook.com/mariataylor">Facebook</a><h2>About Maria Taylor</h2>Maria Taylor’s forthcoming album Story’s End’s songs sit within this same kind of hazy narrative world, almost as chapters, with subtle, brief flashes of color, texture, radiance, and warmth, and it indeed navigates some of the same emotional terrain of Taylor’s previous work: promises fade and are broken, relationships tangle and fragment, and we sleep with the cold, silvery void that follows. Taylor’s hushed vocals, the atmospheric, widescreen strings, the bell-like piano chords, the wide and open vistas that characterize her songs are all here, but with Story’s End, Taylor found more nuance and life to explore and mine–and within that nuance she found real solace. The project began slowly with Taylor building songs from demos, yet it was the spark of conflict that gave her the resolve and focus to complete the project. She relates, “After spending years working on this record, an irrevocable fracture in both my marriage and a friendship gave me the urgency to finish it. I think I needed to make something beautiful as things fell apart around me.”The work that led to Story’s End gave Taylor a kind of emotional lifeline, a thread she could follow that would lead…up, out, anywhere. “I was writing to have anything to do, making music with anyone who would make it with me,” she says. “I think I needed this, to whatever degree, to save my life.” It wasn’t until Taylor returned to these songs that she’d begun previously that she noticed how they reached out to each other and formed a kind of fabric. “I really felt the pull to complete the songs…and in listening back afterward I found that I had a kind of ‘accidental narrative,’” she says. “Maybe not so structured, but…it was me in there, and a kind of story. I opened my eyes and it was just…there.”Begun in Taylor’s California home studio, the project eventually moved to Mike Mogis’ ARC Studios in Omaha where work continued in earnest. “I’d been practicing drums like a madwoman for a Bright Eyes tour, so I played drums on most of the record, Macey [Taylor] (Bright Eyes) came up and played bass, and Mike put guitar on some tracks. Then I gave it to Ben Brodin (First Aid Kit, Bright Eyes) who recorded a lot of my vocals, added much of the other instrumentation, and who ultimately produced it.” Longtime friend and collaborator Brad Armstrong (13 Ghosts, The Glass Hours) produced the pulsing single “Never Thought I’d Feel New,” a song that sits at the very heart of Story’s End. Also featuring Louis Schefano on drums (Regia, Remy Zero), “Never Thought…” finds Taylor wounded yet stronger, “chasing tunnel visions” attempting to “drown out” the dissonance of the monochromatic world around her. “It took five years to finish that song–I just could not find a chorus melody,” Taylor says. “Nik Freitas (the Mystic Valley Band, For Stars) helped me finish that melody so I knew he had to sing on it. And Brad and I have been friends since high school. I love working with him.”Armstrong also collaborated on “Shades of Blue,” a beatific, sweeping, string-laden missive that features a gauzy blanket of harmonies and Taylor reckoning with what has passed, and what has been left: “Just wait…it’ll be okay / All the while will pass the days / and you’ll belong to everything you do.” Further, Conor Oberst contributed lyrics/vocals to the slow-motion tumble of “Sorry I Was Yours” and lyrics to the gentle waltz of “Nathaniel.”Minnesota singer/songwriter Sally Dworksy, who has provided harmony vocals for R.E.M. and Peter Gabriel, and who contributed lead character vocals for The Lion King and Shrek among others, joins Taylor in providing the layered, ethereal harmonies that weave through Story’s End. The shimmering panoramic strings were arranged and recorded by Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes, First Aid Kit) at 64 Sound Studios in Los Angeles with Pierre DeReeder (Rilo Kiley).What makes Story’s End so singular in Taylor’s work, however, is how the album feels at times like a journal, a book of days that give a sense of real meaning and connectedness to the small, fleeting, ephemeral moments that make up a life, a person, even a family; the album at times is like looking at photographs. The tense thrum of a motorcycle veering between cars, a spinning mirror ball, a certain slant of light across a winter hallway, silently staring through the amber light of a glass of whiskey, a scattering of rose petals, a crown of dandelions, the flicker of a porch light as evening crawls across the sky, the bump and spark of a night sky full of fireworks—these are the things that sit on the periphery, just out of our reach in the world of this album, and that give Story’s End its intimacy and warmth. These are the seconds and minutes that Story’s End pays close attention to—and they’re the moments that give us, as Taylor says, “real consolation.” The songs on Story’s End then, in many ways, offer a place of respite and healing, whether regarding the dissolution of a family, or the pain in watching a friend fade from your life, or the shifting emotional colors of the world in chaos. “So much of this ended up being a cry out to take me above it all,” Taylor says, “Whether me or someone else.” These songs seem to say, “you sleep, I’ll drive,” or as she whispers on “Nathaniel,” “Come lay your head on my shoulder.”Really, a narrative can’t exist without one key component: transformation, the promise that what follows the horror is a small shred of hope, and that we aren’t the same at the end of our journey as we are at the beginning. The aching resolve of Story’s End culminates on the sweeping, almost-cinematic “Change Is Coming Soon,” a song that calms and settles that hurt and bruised longing, where a familiar symbol that has filtered through Taylor’s work—a green butterfly—gives the listener a glancing and resonant image of hope and change, a small gesture of what can be seen, she tells us, after “the tea leaves start to settle.”Whether building steadily on her past work with Azure Ray, her many collaborations with artists ranging from Phoebe Bridgers, Adam Duritz, Conor Oberst, or her multiple solo albums, Maria Taylor’s songs have always accessed the melancholic sublime, the movements in a relationship that are evoked more than seen, and the weight they carry. Indeed, Taylor Swift included Taylor’s Azure Ray song “Sleep” on a 6-song “breakup playlist” for a fan on Tumblr in 2015, a song also featured in the 2006 Academy Award-nominated film The Devil Wears Prada. Story’s End’s songs fill in the colors of what follows those movements after they’ve faded and passed. The album is about surrendering: surrendering to what you can’t understand, what you can’t fathom, and how you pull those fragments together to take stock of what is broken and what can be healed. With Story’s End, Maria Taylor doesn’t so much wrestle with her ghosts; rather, she gently carries them off to bed, soothing their brows, quietly singing them back to sleep. Very little really ends here—by story’s end, we’re back where we began.