Half Gringa to Release New Album in March, Shares Lead Single

Half Gringa, the solo project of Chicago-based singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Isabel Olive, has announced her third full-length album, Cosmovisión, out March 28. Having self-released all of her major works to date, she has formalized this process with the announcement of her own label, Teleférico Records. Listen to a lead single, What's the Word, below.

Over the course of her first two full-length releases, Olive has demonstrated stunning emotional intelligence and songwriting elegance. And it has not gone unnoticed. The Chicago Reader named Half Gringa’s debut, Gruñona as among Chicago’s Best Albums of the Decade while VICE named her sophomore full-length, Force to Reckon as one of 22 Essential Albums of 2020, saying that Half Gringa specializes in “empathic and twangy songs about grief and getting stuck in your own thoughts.”

Recorded in Chicago by veteran Califone and Iron & Wine producer Brian Deck, Cosmovisión captures Olive at her most self-possessed, addressing “mythology, mortality, and everything in between,” ideas that Olive says are “too hot to touch, too huge to hold.” Indeed, Half Gringa seems to revel in addressing what cannot be grasped or expressed so easily. 

Olive enlists both familiar and new collaborators to build out the world of Cosmovisión – core musicians include keyboardist Brenden Cabrera, guitarist Sam Cantor, percussionist Quin Kirchner, and bassist Victoria  Park. Cellist Lia Kohl, violinist Lucy Little, trumpeter Ivan Pyzow, and percussionist Daniel Villarreal are also featured.

Olive commonly switches between English and Spanish in her songs. It’s a tribute –– as is the band name –– to her upbringing by a Venezuelan mother and an American father in a Midwestern town. But the bilingualism is not a mere token. For one thing, Olive does not simply sing verses in English and then repeat them in Spanish. Rather there are discrete lines sung in English and in Spanish, respectively. And so one has the sense that the “cosmovisión” is in fact attained only through the bilingualism and the biculturalism, that such are existential orientations. “Too hot to touch, too huge to hold,” and maybe too complex to sing about in only one language.

“It took a while for me to realize that it's not a shortcoming not to be able to perfectly explain or contextualize your experience as a person,” Olive says. 

Though there are clear throughlines between Half Gringa’s celebrated earlier records and Cosmovision, the questions are bigger this time and the messiness is embraced as a necessary side effect of asking questions on such a scale. “It's hard to live in the weeds of your interiority,” Olive says, “and then see the huge, frightening picture around you.” 

Fans of Cass McCombs’s or Beth Orton’s philosophical songwriting will find much to love on this record. Likewise for fans of contemporaries like Jess Williamson. And there are moments in which the potent and harnessed melancholia of Olive’s songcraft echoes that of Lisa Germano. But this work stands apart from those artists. It is distinctly Half Gringa because it is only Olive who stands in front of these particular ancestors, who wields this particular perspective and experience, this particular “cosmovisión.”

Half Gringa and her band will perform an album release show at Schubas in Chicago on May 16.

HALF GRINGA LIVE DATES

March 8 - Bloomington, IN @ Blockhouse

March 9 - Nashville, TN @ The Basement*

March 10 - Memphis, TN @ Folk All Y’all*

March 12 - Dallas, TX @ Deep Ellum Arts Company*

March 13 - Austin, TX @ TBA

May 16 - Chicago, IL @ Schubas

* supporting Lizzie No

Photo credit: Makenzie Creden

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