Melbourne’s Laura Jean has announced she will preview a forthcoming album, ‘Amateurs’, with a full band show at the Ukaria Cultural Centre in the Adelaide Hills next month.
The songwriter took to social media to detail the follow up to 2018’s ‘Devotion’, explaining that she’d been “recording… very slowly for the last year or so with producer Tim Bruniges, and string arrangements by Erkki Veltheim”.
“It’s… kind of a 70s folk rock soundtrack to the pretend musical of my current life. Um. Anyway, me and full band (will introduce them soon) and strings are previewing the whole album plus some hits,” she said.
Laura Jean will preview ‘Amateurs’ at the Ukaria Cultural Centre on June 26, with tickets on sale now via the venue.
Jean recently featured on Geoffery O’Connor‘s duet ‘Foolish Enough’. Last year, she collaborated with Kurdish singer-songwriter Farhad Bandesh on the single ‘Friendship’. Bandesh, a detained refugee from Ilam, Iran (Kurdistan), emailed Jean regarding the collaboration while he was detained on Manus Island. He then recorded the song from inside the Melbourne Immigrant Transfer Accommodation (MITA) in Broadmeadows.
Jean also contributed backing vocals to songs on Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever‘s 2020 album ‘Sideways To New Italy’, appearing on US radio station KEXP from home to perform ‘Falling Thunder’ with them.
In her last shows before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jean supported Aldous Harding at The Forum in Melbourne. There, she played austere versions of new material with Rory Stenning of Honey 2 Honey on keyboard.