28 April 2023 - 0 Comments

Tom Lark AKA Shannon Fowler has released Live Wires, the second single from his forthcoming album, Brave Star.

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Due out on June 9 2023, Brave Star is the first new musical material from Tom Lark after a seven-year hiatus, and the debut full-length album from the Ōtautahi-born, Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist.

Live Wires follows lead single Radio Blaster, and is a stroll through the mind's eye of its author – an exercise in existential reflection.

"Live Wires was the turning point for me with this new album," says Fowler of the new track. "I’d made a few songs but when I wrote Live Wires it gave me the momentum to finish it. It’s a song about death and legacy. We only have the time we have to express what we can and people won’t remember everything about us, but they do remember how you made them feel and that’s something that can last and be passed down.”

Shaped in equal parts by the confronting vulnerability of John Lennon, and the troubled braggadocio of spaghetti westerns, the songs on Brave Star are dreamy, well-penned psychedelic folk with a philosophical bent. And you could be forgiven for at times thinking Kurt Vile himself was singing down the line.

Brave Star follows two eponymous Tom Lark EPs, which were released in 2011 and 2015 respectively. Those early tunes found a home locally on the Student Radio Network, and abroad on Australian radio station Triple J – where Something To Tell You reached #1 Most Played.

Following this success Fowler chose to set aside the Tom Lark moniker for a period, dipping his toes in the warm waters of pop music and releasing a series of bangers under the Shannon Matthew Vanya pseudonym – as well as producing for a number of other artists, including Merk, Randa, and A.C. Freezy.

With Tom Lark's Brave Star Fowler returns to his first love, which turns out to be making sunburnt psychedelic folk fit for sensitive cowboys to meander and muse to.

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