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PREORDER
Ships When IN STOCK.
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ARTIST
TITLE
Escape from L.A.
FORMAT
LP
LABEL
CATALOG #
ST 071LP
ST 071LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
12/12/2025
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"Kurt Vile once sang that he had a freeway in mind, but Matt Kivel (Vile's former Woodsist labelmate) literally has a freeway mind. He started out in music as part of the buzzy, Eagle Rock-based indie band Princeton, toured the country relentlessly, burned out, and then resurfaced with a series of bleak, hauntingly spare solo albums that garnered widespread critical acclaim. Over the ensuing decade, Kivel collaborated closely with a growing set of brilliant, and varied musicians from across the globe, including Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Alasdair Roberts, Madi Diaz, Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Jana Horn, and Satomimagae. In 2017, he started writing the songs for what would become his eighth solo album, Escape from L.A., an autobiographical song cycle that chronicles the first 33 years of Kivel's life in the City of Angels. The material was labored over, rewritten, rearranged, and rerecorded numerous times, between LA, New York, and Austin. It involved over 20 collaborators, a string section, pedal steel guitars, and a renewed lyrical and vocal clarity that allows the narrative vignettes to unspool in vivid detail. Kivel sings about freeway pile ups, the Northridge earthquake, the fall of the twin towers as transmitted via television news, the glitter of Hollywood celebrities, and a mythical tsunami that could wipe out all of LA and then pairs it with the quotidian details of his life -- teenage romances on the beach, a dying dog, the failure of his first band set against the backdrop of Vampire Weekend's meteoric rise, a meditative conversation with his twin brother outside Dodger stadium, and, strikingly, the tale of his family's move to Los Angeles in 1988, spurred by the casting of his father in the baseball epic The Natural, alongside Robert Redford. It's a beautiful, grounded statement and one of Kivel's best."
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