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NYC power pop artist Charlie Kaplan announces new album 'Country Life In America,' releases "Talkin' French" single

Photo credit: Sam Shapiro

NYC power pop artist Charlie Kaplan will unveil their sophomore studio album this September.

Announced today, Country Life In America will be released on September 15. The first single from the album titled "Talkin' French" is an ode to Kaplan’s wife. The artist further explains:

My wife’s first language was French, and I’ve always felt a little like the Gomez to her Morticia. When this song came together, I was incredulous it was about her: I’d never written a love song before for fear it’d fall short of my feelings. But with her as the slender verse, me as the smitten chorus, and the bridge as the life we escape to together, I finally feel like I got it. Of particular note is Winston Cook-Wilson’s gorgeous, out-of-time passage, recorded at the piano in my childhood home, where he is momentarily relieved of the song’s jangling gravity before falling back to earth and into form.

Kaplan said this about their forthcoming studio album:

“I wrote "Country Life in America"'s nine songs in the years after graduating college. It’s in some ways a lost album, made up of the songs I wrote then, and the ones in the same vein that came after. It’s also a tribute to that time and place, and to the people I shared it with.

I remember the long hours I spent waiting for my life to start. I was restless and impatient. To overcome the stultifying quietude of those days, I peered into the guitar to imagine the types of rooms I’d rather be in: Loud, packed, heaving, sweating singalongs to well-loved songs, friends nearby, lost in the moment. This was the setlist for my theater of the mind.

Finishing and recording these songs now, I have the privileged vantage point of identifying with that young man’s struggles and being the voice he might have wanted in his head. I can take in his triumphs too; finding love, finding out how to sing about it, finding out that’s what it’s all about.”

Pre-orders for Country Life In America can be made here. "Talkin' French" is available on digital services right now.

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