Montreal singer-songwriter Alex Nicol will release the “A Long Year” EP on June 30th and has shared the title track which features Angel Deradoorian. The title-track of a five-song EP (arriving 30 June), this lead single includes the unmistakable guest vocals of Angel Deradoorian (Dirty Projectors / Decisive Pink).“I wanted to express my frustration at running from my feelings for so long,” Alex says. “It felt like the world was crumbling at the same time as I was pretending everything was fine, but I really wasn’t, and I finally expressed it. It feels like one long exhale for me.”
Guided by Nicol’s haunting vocal pirouettes, “Been A Long Year” is an acoustic ballad which connects personal feelings of grief and sadness at the loss of many loved ones with a wider feeling of an emptiness that permeates through the modern world. Conjuring images of towns desolated by unemployment and families feeling the pressures of these rapidly changing and challenging times, evocative lyrics like “And all the shops are empty / And the diners too / The miller, baker, and seamstress / Gotta find something new to do / But it’s hard times when you add it up…” weigh a heavy lode and will cut deep.
Speaking about the track, Alex Nicol explains: “In “Been A Long Year”, I wanted to express my frustration at running from my feelings for so long. It felt like the world was crumbling at the same time as I was pretending everything was fine, but I really wasn’t, and I finally expressed it. It feels like one long exhale for me.”
Dense of subject matter, but gossamer to the touch, the floaty backing vocals provided by Deradoorian, sombre french horn hums of Pietro Amato, and astral orchestrations of violinist Emmanuel Ethier provide an otherworldly mirror to Nicol’s lucid observations of real-world strife.
The years surrounding the EP’s creation weren’t particularly kind to anyone, but shortly after completing his 2020 debut long-player ‘All For Nada’, Nicol entered a phase of staggering loss and mourning. Friends died. Family members died. He lost his job. As each new crushing sadness hit, Nicol began realising he’d spent his adult life avoiding difficult emotions like the ones he was being overpowered by. It slowly became clearer that his upbringing had conditioned him to maintain a false but constant state of hyper-stability. A small lifetime’s worth of unacknowledged feelings began coming to the surface and everything in Nicol’s world began to change.
The Fat Angel Sings 