Colin Stetson is returning with his first solo recording since 2017, The love it took to leave you is out September 13th on Envision Records. The title track features new ways of capturing the artist‘s music and instrumentation by intensifying his practice and to continue challenging the historical canon of the bass saxophone while crafting emotive, haunting and harmonically innovative music.

Stetson commented on the inspiration for the video: “We were using the same live setup as I normally would to amplify—a full PA in the building’s spaces—so we were really able to move the kind of air that I can move—really saturating the room, hitting the walls hard. And then we further fleshed it out.”

Written some years ago but always intended as the centerpiece of an album, the title track, “The love it took to leave you,” pulses into view from a forlorn and alien distance. Voiced through alto saxophone it sets a scene saturated with yearning and ruminating on the conflicted aches and oscillations that arise from love lost, the grasping, the collapse; and the rebuild, the struggle for dignity, self-compassion, and finally liberation. It is a composition Stetson‘s been performing for several years, waiting for the right context to bring its full emotional and musical anatomy to life.

The love it took to leave you Tracklist

1. The love it took to leave you
2.  The Six
3.  The Augur
4. Hollowing
5. To think we knew from fear
6. Malediction
7. Green and grey and fading light
8. Strike your forge and grin
9. Ember
10. So say the soaring bullbats
11. Bloodrest

Photo Credit: Mauricio Alvarado