Dent May Across The Multiverse

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About

“Don’t wanna move to Southern California / I wasn’t really meant for LA…” So sang Dent May once upon a time, now he’s eating those words with a side of avocado toast in his new Los Angeles bungalow. What made the lifelong Mississippi boy pull up stakes and head west? “No one looks at you funny if you wear a tuxedo to the supermarket.” What he means is he moved there to shake up his surroundings, clear his head, and write the most accomplished record of his young career, the magical mystery tour de force Across the Multiverse.

Following the lead of musical-polymaths-with-LA-ties before him like Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and Harry Nilsson, Dent’s style on Across the Multiverse will be familiar to fans of his previous work. Yet there’s something more refined about this collection… Stately strings mingle with boogie piano like old friends. Synths weave a celestial backdrop throughout. Every verse, bridge and chorus in its right place, giving it the unmistakable feel of a true songwriting craftsman at work. Lyrically Dent has never been sharper, musing on themes like modern romance (“Picture on a Screen”, “Face Down in the Gutter of Your Love”), existential dread (“Dream 4 Me”, “I’m Gonna Live Forever Until I’m Dead”), and the distance to the moon (“Distance to the Moon”) as he searches for meaning among the infinite scrolling feeds of our 21st century augmented reality. The title track, a duet with Frankie Cosmos, is a deep space love song about finding love beyond impossible boundaries.

Across the Multiverse was written and recorded in a sunny bedroom in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood, with Dent producing and playing nearly every instrument himself. The tracks were selected from dozens of songs written after the LA move, a gold rush of productivity inspired by late nights DJing rare disco funk cuts at local watering holes. It’s his first record for new label Carpark and will be released August 18th.

Artist Bio

Known for shepherding a kind of classic American songwriting into the age of bedroom recording, Mississippi born musician Dent May is soaking it in and taking his time on his new LP Late Checkout. After contributing heavily to his local Oxford music and art community, May began putting songs online and performing alone under his birth name in 2007. After befriending Animal Collective while they were recording Merriweather Post Pavilion in Oxford, the band offered to release May’s debut The Good Feeling Music Of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele (2009) through their record label Paw Tracks. May’s distinctive croon and sentimental writing won over fans around the globe, and his music continued to evolve on Do Things (2012) and Warm Blanket (2013). Pining for a new scene and life in a big city, May moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and began work on his sprawling epic Across the Multiverse (2017). His first record on Carpark, Across the Multiverse saw May taking his songwriting to the far reaches of home recording with expansive arrangements and illustrative lyrics. Following the release of Across the Multiverse, May set out for a new final frontier—his own recording studio. May partnered with friends and collaborators Pat Jones and Michael Rosen to construct Honeymoon Suite Recording Studio from scratch, and began recording himself and other artists there in January 2018. May afforded himself the time to gradually craft a new hi-fi pop alchemy on the songs for Late Checkout, while still aiming for a sparse intimacy in his arrangements. Across the dozen new tracks that make up his fifth LP, May grapples with the swinging emotions of our contemporary reality with his rare optimism and distinguished sound. Late Checkout arrives August 21st via Carpark.