Language & Mirrors: CD

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"Language & Mirrors" comes in a book-style digipack with art and lyrics.

The right kind of friction creates glorious sparks. Coursing within the heart and mind of singer-songwriter Kristen Rae Bowden is a beautiful turmoil of tenderness and willfulness. It’s a paradoxical sentiment also evident in her artistic sensibilities. On her masterful debut, Language and Mirrors, she fluidly, and authentically, inhabits earthy Americana and majestic orchestral rock.

Select album standouts include “Driven To Roam,” “Party On The Mountain,” “Solid Ground,” and “My Father’s Daughter.” “Driven To Roam” opens with a lilting melancholy piano figure, ethereal guitars, and smoldering vocals. Its orchestral expanse surges upward dramatically as the song unfolds, lending the feeling of an emotional odyssey. The country-tinged “Party On The Mountain” pines for those carefree nights of yore drinking in the fields of her hometown of Boone, North Carolina with her high school buds. “It’s one of the few songs I’ve written not inspired by feelings of frustration,” Kristen says with a good-natured laugh. “Solid Ground” is the crossroads where Kristen’s earthy folksiness melds with her brazen prog-rock sensibility.

The poignant and autobiographical ballad “My Father’s Daughter” might be the closest song to Kristen’s heart on Language And Mirrors. Her father passed away when she was 18 (her father was 61 when Kristen was born). The track details the complexities inherent in having a relationship with someone with a similar story, and touches on the meaning of the album title, Language and Mirrors. Kristen expands: “The album’s concept centers around how the people closest to us reflect ourselves. They are our metaphorical mirrors.”