It was supposed to be an exercise in simplicity. A six-person pinky swear, Mia Riddle and her band recorded their new album standing in a circle, live, to two-inch tape, the old-fashioned way. The upstate New York farmhouse studio was drafty as they cooked and worked and slept, a magical late-summer memory now. Exactly one year and one day later they received delivery of Ticonderoga, the intervening year a blurry story of complications, heartache, and, ultimately, redemption.
The album is named for the epic poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. In this poem, a man is given a mysterious clue, and realizes too late that the clue was the foretelling of his own murder. The songs on Ticonderoga, in turn, presage a series of catastrophic events in a relationship, as though the universe decided to turn this wishing well of horrors in to reality. It was prolonged, it was gory, it changed everything.
The dust has settled, a year and a day later, and the record is here, grand in sentiment and sound, and somehow clarified in the time that has passed. It is lush and live, and most importantly, it is all true.
Ticonderoga is the fifth self-release by Mia Riddle. She and her band keep an active performance schedule in New York and Brooklyn, and have toured extensively in the UK and US. Their music has received substantial college and BBC radio airplay throughout the globe.
