FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

On loss, survival, starting over, and why it took ten years to make this record.

Nobody waits ten years between albums on purpose. New Orleans songwriter Kristin Diable didn't have a choice, and you can hear every one of those years in Impossible Things.

A Baton Rouge native who has called New Orleans home since 2009, Diable has performed at Austin City Limits and Jazz Fest, and her songs have been placed on CBS, Netflix and Amazon. After her last album, Create Your Own Mythology, came years most people keep private: a pandemic that shut down live music, untangling from an abusive relationship, the death of her brother to the opioid epidemic, and becoming a mother, the joy that finally carried her back to the studio.

For a while, making another album felt impossible.

Impossible Things is what happened when she chose to believe otherwise. She wrote all eleven songs and recorded them at Dockside Studios, on the Vermilion Bayou in Maurice, Louisiana, with producer and keyboardist Ben Alleman and her band: Joe Stark, Jemila Dunham, David Shirley and Whitney Coleman. Justin Tocket engineered and mixed the record, and John McLaggan mastered it at Parachute Mastering.

It is the sound Diable has been building toward for years: Dream Pop Americana. Southern roots and Louisiana mysticism meet psychedelic, cinematic and electronic textures. Piano, B3 and Wurlitzer sit beside synths, and guitars share space with stacked harmonies. Unhurried. Unflinching. Deeply, stubbornly alive. Unlikely Americana for curious souls. 

The album doesn't dramatize hard years so much as alchemize them. "Bidding" is for anyone who has finally, quietly decided they deserve better. "Ever Softly You Go" began as a poem and became a lullaby, sung as much to the girl she once was as to anyone. "Impossible Things" reads like a spell, a set of beliefs to say out loud before the sun comes up.

Impossible Things is meant to keep you company. It believes in hard miracles before breakfast. It believes your art is your life and your life is your art. And it holds that transcendence isn't waiting on the other side of hardship. It's right here, if we can quiet the noise long enough to hear it.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

GRAMMY Awards®

Best Americana Album

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

Kristin calls it Dream Pop Americana: southern Americana at the root, refracted through dream pop, cinematic textures and subtle electronic shimmer.

The instrumentation tells the story. Piano, B3 organ and Wurlitzer sit beside synths. Electric and acoustic guitars share space with stacked background vocals. The arrangements leave room, and the songs take their time.

Think neo-Americana reimagining its altars under neon lights: Sunday morning mercy with Saturday night glitter still clinging to its boots. The mysticism is Louisiana's own, the everyday and the otherworldly in the same room, the way they have always lived together in New Orleans.

Impossible Things was recorded at Dockside Studios, a riverside studio on the Vermilion Bayou in Maurice, Louisiana, in the heart of Acadiana.

Kristin is a Baton Rouge native who has made New Orleans home since 2009. She made the album with producer and keyboardist Ben Alleman, a New Orleans-bred, Los Angeles-based composer, and her band: Joe Stark on guitars, Jemila Dunham on bass, David Shirley on drums and Whitney Coleman on background vocals.

The album was engineered and mixed by Justin Tocket, with additional engineering by Brian Starley and Ben Alleman, and mastered by John McLaggan at Parachute Mastering.