Stream: Kishi Bashi, ‘Hey Big Star’

Kevin Bronson on August 3rd, 2016

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Kauru Ishibashi — the singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist known as Kishi Bashi — sounds as if he’s having great fun on the first two singles from his forthcoming third album “Sonderlust,” due Sept. 16 via the appropriately named Joyful Noise Recordings. There’s the exuberant, ’70s-pop feel of “Say Yeah,” with its slippery synth and tasty flute solo. And “Hey Big Star” bounces along like one of Arcade Fire’s dance anthems, only with ELO synths. But, explains the 40-year-old Seattle native who was the touring violinist for the likes of Regina Spektor, Sondre Leche and of Montreal, he was not necessarily a happy camper during the creative process, which followed years of touring behind his first two solo releases.

“Touring and its accompanying lifestyle took a heavy toll on my soul and my family,” he says. “As I sat down to write songs last summer, I went to all my usual conduits of creation: violin loops, guitar, piano, and I came up with the musical equivalent of fumes. I tried to create orchestral pop recordings that I assumed were my forte, and in turn, I found myself standing in front of a creative wall of frightening heights.” Eventually, he dug deep and completed the 10-track album, with assists from producer Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear), engineer Pat Dillet (Angelique Kidjo, David Byrne) and drummer Matt Chamberlain (Morrissey, Fiona Apple, of Montreal).

The album title, perhaps, is most instructive. “Sonderlust” is derived from writer John Koening’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which imagines “sonder” as “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own … an epic story that continues invisibly around you, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed … in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway.”

Think about that for a second.

||| Stream: “Hey Big Star” and “Say Yeah”