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Artist: My Brightest Diamond

Title: Bring Me The Workhorse

Label: Asthmatic Kitty Records

Catalog#: AKR023

Format: CD

Release Date: August 22, 2006

UPC: 656605829524

MY BRIGHTEST DIAMOND:

BRING ME THE WORKHORSE

My Brightest Diamond is Shara Worden, a trained opera singer turned pop songwriter whose debut

album Bring Me The Workhorse courageously gathers all the essential elements of classical and pop to

create an album that begins to break down the barriers of both worlds. These songs are simultaneously

gentle and urgent, evoking moments of tremendous joy and sorrow with the magnitude of Italian opera

and the modesty of a Japanese haiku.

Bring Me The Workhorse shows unusual versatility in a singer who can channel the vocal theatrics of

Kate Bush, the soulful seductiveness of Nina Simone and the gothic pop of Portishead, sometimes in

one song. Shara’s songwriting blurs the lines between rock show and recital, incorporating the contra-

puntal elements of a baroque love song alongside love ballads and rock anthems. Her vocal lines

reached for Puccini, but her guitar style is akin to Blonde Redhead or PJ Harvey. The center of gravity

here is the workmanship of a woman whose imagination has no limits.

Under Shara’s gaze, ordinary objects begin to have supernatural meanings. A robin’s nest, a grocery

list, a glass bottle come to represent love, mortality, and the overwhelming need to "freak out" every

once in a while. Shara is not afraid to use superlatives. But she also considers the benefits of self-con-

trol. This is most evident in the carefulness of her arrangements. Earthy drums and bass guitar are

augmented by Celeste, music boxes, prepared piano, and a string quartet; each song is scrupulously

composed and arranged by Shara herself.

Shara’s songwriting reconciles the high art of opera with the low-brow of the folk song by compounding

them into a form that is both as sublime as it is pragmatic. The music is set in transcendent land-

scapes familiar to Wagner’s operas, but it is also planted firmly in the materials of everyday life: dirt,

tree branches, bird feathers and thrown away charms. Strings and chimes beckon mysterious appari-

tions, but Shara’s tone of voice is dead serious. Almost every song pivots around a moment of crisis,

distilling stories to their most distressing points of contact: a phone call, an injured horse, a dragonfly

caught in a spider’s web. Shara doesn’t share all the information — just the stuff that matters. The

effect is a sensational compression of time, in which an entire event is summarized in a single note.

This, of course, is the essence of opera. But My Brightest Diamond is much more than musical theater.

There is a continuous reminder of ordinary life—phone calls, cardboard boxes, pieces of paper—as well

as the humor one might find in an old TV episode of Wonder Woman or Lewis Carroll’s Alice in

Wonderland. Shara’s songs reconcile all the complex emotions found in each of us: she can grieve as
comfortably as she can laugh, sometimes in the same breath.

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Asthmatic Kitty Records

P.O. Box 1282 Lander,

WY 82520 USA

www.asthmatickitty.com