Full Album Stream: Matt Bauer, No Shape Can Hold Me Now

Feast your ears on No Shape Can Hold Me Now, the new EP from folk artist Matt Bauer. The EP, out now on Crosbill Records, features guest vocals from Texas chanteuse Jolie Holland.

“Most of these songs were real surprises to me,” Bauer tells American Songwriter.

“Some of them, like ‘Tonight’ or ‘Homeward Bound’ are much more direct emotionally than I am used to writing. And others just had a weird route to being completed.

“I wrote the first verse for ‘Andaman Sea’ a few years ago late at night in a super sketchy hotel room in London. There was a game show on called Golden Balls. There was a shared bathroom with three little stairs up to the toilet. I recorded the original demo with my friend Nive Neilsen the next day in her attic. The song stayed in a drawer for a while and some of the lyrics show up rewritten in another song on last year’s The Jessamine County Book of the Living.

“It wasn’t until years after the original demo that I was able to find the rest of the song in a conversation with a friend about traveling alone, how it can make you feel temporarily removed from your own life, maybe removed from time a little bit. Oh, it’s about that and my horrendous fear of flying.”

Bonus: visit MattBauermusic.comfor a free download of his cover of Prince’s “Under The Cherry Moon.”