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- Photo by Daniel Romano, 2025
June 17, 2025 // Carson McHone Announces New Album Pentimento, Shares Video For Lead Single “Winter Breaking”
pen·ti·men·to a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas — early 20th century: from Italian, literally “repentance”
Today, Carson McHone announces Pentimento, out September 12 on Merge Records. She shares a first offering from Pentimento, “Winter Breaking,” which introduces the album’s titular traces - building itself out of birdsong and spoken word, along with a video featuring the art and work of ceramicist Alejandra Almuelle.
“This project continues to be, really, a community effort - What began as a methodical structuring of personal artifacts kept speaking of collaboration, and so allowed me to open up the process to others and bring it to life. Making the initial recording brought together a group of six musicians, but the project has expanded to include a web of many artists and disciplines. If my last album, Still Life, represents a static moment, a pause before a pivot, Pentimento is the natural next step - It’s full of movement. Movement through time and space, through many forms… It’s a project that engages with shadow, with impulse, with paradox and with play. I hope the record illustrates the process of integrating these things, of acknowledging the complexity of being/becoming. I am so happy to begin releasing this out into the world now - so we begin at the top, with the very opening of the album - ‘Winter Breaking’.”
McHone will embark on a summer tour of Europe with Daniel Romano in July. US and Canadian tour dates are in the offing—including a listening party and multi-disciplinary performance of Pentimento for In the Soil Arts Fest: Harvesting Soil in St. Catherines, Ontario on September 12, the night of the album release, and a month-long Texas residency in October.
All of the songs of Pentimento began as poems against the backdrop of global crisis, national borders, civil unrest, birth, death, bad love, new love, true love. They were written in the desert during spring and summer. There, history and time are visual in the drama of great boulders, in layers on a rockface—the potential and past energy of the ancient sea-floor. Some of these lyrics were written on postcards and in letters. Others began as embellishments on watercolor paintings, or captions for a photograph in a diary, or were written as responses in the margins of a journal to a child, newborn, from a generation past. These “artifacts” from writing/living informed what would eventually become material for this record.
Later, beside the ocean, and during the first snow of the season, a special group of musicians gathered to bring the album to life. While half of the songs were built into place according to a rigorous “plan,” the other half came together for the first time on this very occasion and were learned and performed live on the spot. Over six days, all of it was captured on an 8-track cassette tape recorder, including fortuitous feedback bass drone, and spontaneous laughter.
-Carson McHone
***
The first notes of Pentimento are birdsong, and with it in the distance, Carson McHone reads from an 1840 letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller: “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.” One of the birds whistles a distinct three-note tune. McHone whistles it back. A piano takes up the line, and the song “Winter Breaking” blooms into being.
In the study of physical art, the pentimento is an artifact, a remnant of a previous draft or altogether different painting that’s apparent beneath layers of paint on a finished canvas. Within seconds of Pentimento, one hears how the album organizes itself around this idea: “Winter Breaking” is an astonishing piece of songwriting, a meticulously crafted guitar-pop jewel that finds McHone at the peak of her powers as a bandleader and a lyricist. The first 30 seconds contain the pentimenti, the earlier sounds, spaces, and materials that became this sound.
The effect is staggering; even for McHone, whose output to this point has seen her channel seemingly disparate influences into a unique, alluring sonic signature, Pentimento marks a radical expansion of the scale of her ambitions. The “all of it” present here is not just the album, but context. The 185 years between McHone and Emerson. Two seasons in the desert. Six days spent oceanside with friends. The eternity between us and the first notes of birdsong.
Thrillingly alive in the music are exquisite articulations of pastoral folk with snatches of spoken word or a choice instrument that casts a song in elegiac light. Occasional riffs that call back to her roots in Texas build towards moments of organic and tactile rock, with tambourines and claps, homemade instruments, and layered acoustics. The record is an anchor in the ceaseless flow of time, a home amidst the tumult of the moment we find ourselves in now—love and beauty in the presence of brutality.
Pentimento is an audacious and rewarding record. It is also a reckoning: How can love and beauty exist in the presence of brutality? Disquietingly. Dissonantly. Against its shadow and bearing its mark. This is what McHone and her collaborators capture on Pentimento with the subtlety of watercolor painting and the richness of verse, in ghost vocals and child voices alike. Every layer is a universe unto itself, revealing the pulse that animates Carson McHone’s creative drive. Arranged here and expressed as a whole, it constitutes a masterpiece.
MRG 872, PENTIMENTO
ABOUT
Label + US Publicity: Merge Records, Colette Arrand
Canadian Publicity: Susan O’Grady, New Moon Publicity
UK / European Booking: Sedate Bookings, Jair Hoogland
UK / Europe Label (for Still Life, Carousel): Loose Music
Carson McHone is a songwriter from Austin, Texas, now residing in Southern Ontario. McHone’s 2018 internationally released Carousel (LOOSE MUSIC/NINE MILE RECORDS), produced by Mike McCarthy, was a reimagining of songs from her formative years coming of age playing in dive bars. It established her as a shrewd artist who raises unconventional questions with language equally at home in a poem or a short story. In 2019, during a hectic tour schedule, the songs of Still Life were written, and the following year McHone teamed up with Canadian musician and producer, Daniel Romano, to record the album while sequestered at a home studio in the fall of 2020. Still Life was released on MERGE RECORDS/LOOSE MUSIC in February 2022 with McHone touring the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK in support of the album, as well as joining, and performing with, Daniel Romano’s Outfit. In September 2022 McHone released Camera Varda Variations (MERGE RECORDS/LOOSE MUSIC), a digital EP featuring two songs from Still Life re-recorded at the Outfit’s new studio, Camera Varda, with the group as her band, akin to the collaboration/live show of the two acts on tour. McHone has recorded and toured three albums as a member of Daniel Romano’s Outfit: Cobra Poems (2022), La Luna (2023), and Too Hot To Sleep (2024), all released on YOU’VE CHANGED RECORDS. McHone’s 2024 EP, ODES, is a collection of carefully curated covers recorded at Camera Varda with her bandmates from the Outfit, released July 19th via MERGE RECORDS. Pentimento, McHone’s forthcoming LP, out September 12, 2025 on MERGE, finds her on the frontier of her musical imagination, channeling inputs as diverse and surprising as guitar rock, pastoral folk, poetry, field recordings, visual art, memory, family, and landscape into her most profound effort to date. Written in the Texas desert and recorded on the Canadian coast, Pentimento is a layered compilation of life’s shifting circumstances and the disquiet of the world at large.
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