Already known for his work in Little Joy and Los Hermanos, Rodrigo Amarante has announced his debut solo album, Cavalo, out May 6 on Easy Sound. The first single, “Hourglass,” is now available for streaming above.

A note from Rodrigo:

This is my first solo record. It was made during an unexpected but very welcome exile, in a land I wouldn’t predict I’d moor my boat for long but that, given such difference and a refreshingly nameless arrival, gave me the opportunity to re-cognize my nature, to recoup my ascendance and to disclose a new perspective over myself. It was as a foreigner, separated from others and yet still somehow attached to the furniture I had left behind, bits of myself I hung up around me like dead mirrors I could no longer turn my face to, that came to focus the beauty of the empty room ahead, a hint. I became enamoured by space, by distance, and began to see the double that looks at me from the outside, that reflects the vision I call mine, vehicle and invented accomplice to which I am also a channel, the one I name Cavalo.

I have always felt like a foreigner, imagined myself as an explorer, moving from city to city every three years as a kid, pretending to have the forbearance and courage i ended up forging while secretly carrying the resentment of the imposed detour, of the wait to return. When I finally arrived back in Rio no longer a child and with an accent three times tampered I realized that my home town was mine only because I had invented it, its memory a dream of smells and hope that didn’t exist in space, maybe in time. I discovered myself a stranger, what I had been since I first left, what I knew I would forever be. And it was light and warm, I felt free and grateful, strong, and like this I departed again. I ended up finding myself in a type of desert, happy to be alone, overwhelmed with the void, with silence, the place where I wrote these songs from. I believe that everybody can feel foreign in one way or another, in the way that they feel they’re perceived by others, in their bodies, their streets, in their fate perhaps, so I dream that this vehicle, an unpredictable mirror that i fill, that serves me and that moves me, can also move you, serve yet others, with luck.

To give room to this double that appears as an echo, that shows itself with distance reflected, I opened up space as much as I knew how, subtracted all undue, threw adjectives away and using different languages I was forced to a new conciseness, gathering codes that wouldn’t always be understood as a whole and therefore can create other spaces, allow diversions, inventions. I also threw away the cover. Everything that was inside protected by the cover came out, became exposed, clean of directions or colors, unashamed, open. And the simple beauty of the page revealed itself, black and white that we like to use as a synonym of things clear and exact but that is where the infinite delight of interpretation resides, where the biggest gap is, a lacuna. Inside only the music. And there was yet another separation, another double: inside and outside, the thing and the name of the thing, me and the notion I have of myself. Between one and the other the open hand, the train at the station, an opening in the veil, your own dream. With luck!

Thank you for the chance.

R. Amarante

Cavalo
[Easy Sound]
Street Date: May 6, 2014

1. Nada Em Vão
2. Hourglass
3. Mon Nom
4. Irene
5. Maná
6. Fall Asleep
7. The Ribbon
8. O Cometa
9. Cavalo
10. I’m Ready
11. Tardei

http://www.rodrigoamarante.com.br/