Shannon Wright Puts Trust in Providence

Sometimes you just have to wonder what keeps Shannon Wright in Atlanta, when clearly the bulk of her fans are centered in Europe, primarily France. She’ll readily admit her oft-times gloomy, minor-key heavy music doesn’t fly with many folks in the States, where she doesn’t even have a label anymore and where she’ll usually only play nowadays if she’s opening for friends like Shellac or Yann Tiersen.

So it should come as little surprise that the release party for her new album Providence (out Sept. 20 via her French label, Vicious Circle) will be taking place not at The EARL nor 529 but Le Trianon, a 1,087-seat theater in Paris. Tickets for the Oct. 14 concert are on sale now, if you’d care to make the trek. Other stops on her upcoming October jaunt include venues in Belgium and Luxembourg, but I’m pretty sure neither Lyft nor Uber will cart you that far, even if you tip well.

So far, the only music released in advance of Providence is “These Present Arms,” a wispy solo piano dirge that manages to be both soothingly lovely and wrist-slitting dreary. Were I a betting man, I’d wager that the rest of the album deviates little from the approach that Wright has perfected over the course of a dozen albums, not counting the all-but-forgotten Crowsdell, although I’m hoping for a few unhinged electric guitar spasms – she excels at those. In other news, she also composed the score to last year’s French film Les Confins du Monde (To the Ends of the World).

Photo by Jason Maris.