Megan Nash & the Best of Intentions w/ Dump Babes

Throughout their self-produced sophomore album Soft Focus Futures, Megan Nash mines the
death of her marriage for clues that could decode its demise and set her on a path toward some
sort of stability in self. In the process, they achieve a distillation of heartache and its attendant,
all-consuming power that arrives like a 100-year flood in blossoming crescendos buoyed by
precise poetry evoking unnatural disasters, the tyranny of silence, old dogs, and the isolation of
life in the country. The blue hues, unsteady triumph, and emotional grandeur of Soft Focus
Futures earns a spiritual kinship with author Elizabeth Smart’s masterpiece, By Grand Central
Station I Sat Down and Wept, about Smart’s affair with George Barker. “The water submerges
and blends, but I am not dead,” Smart writes about grief and love. “O I am not dead. I am under
the sea. The entire sea is on top of me.”

After “Table For One” sets a scene of quiet devastation with a sparse acoustic guitar strum, the
slow-building tidal wave of “Artifact” reveals the loneliness of separation’s aftermath: “Our love is
an island where we used to live,” Nash sings over the song’s dreamy wash. “It was swallowed
by the ocean.” With “My Own Heart,” she seeks a cosmos-sized space in which she’s able to
learn to be alone with herself; the more grounded, guitar-fuelled “Coffee” hammers home the
less desirable realities of that isolation, like bad dates and the fear that that accompanies being
on your own in a creaky old house. With incisive, earthy verse, Nash invokes the particularities
of their Prairie home, parsing through childhood memories of her family’s small farm and
searching for her place in that lineage with “Another Silent Night,” while using the vernacular of
small-town gossip to paint a lonesome rural scene on “Are We Still In Love?” The sonic scope of
“Chew Quietly/Clean Slate” looms vast over anxieties about meeting someone new, deploying
epic, frenzied breakdowns to communicate inner turmoil. As the curtain closes, Nash is careful
to avoid claiming resolution or closure—the nature of those concepts are fickle at best—and
instead chooses to let her heart beat out “the poisonous rhythm of the truth.” But the silence
lingering in the exhales intertwined at the end of “Table For One (reprise)” begins to, maybe,
carve out space once again for a great flood of love.

Soft Focus Futures is set to be released via acronym Records on what would’ve been the
fourth anniversary of her wedding—November 3, 2021. To build the album’s lush soundscapes,
Nash turned to their long-time musical co-conspirators the Best of Intentions, composed of
talented multi-instrumentalists Dana Rempel, Darnell Stewart, and Tanner Wilhelm Hale.
Additional contributions feature Brady Frank, Dalton Lam, Digawolf, Stacy Tinant, Jenna
Nash, Logan Amon, and Megan’s wizened dog Shiloh, to whom she dedicates a poem in the
liner notes of the album. Soft Focus Futures was officially engineered by Dana Rempel, but in
most cases, because of pandemic restrictions, each contributing player individually recorded
their own parts in a collective act of camaraderie that testifies to the closeness of those involved
and their faith in the quality of Nash’s work. Despite the distance, Soft Focus Futures is a
cohesive creation that sounds as though it was made in the presence of dear friends so close
they could breathe on one another. The album was mixed and mastered by Justin Bender at
Divergent Sounds Studio.

Nash, who is a gender-fluid, non-binary woman—and unabashed Scorpio—uses both she and
they pronouns and lives on Treaty 4 Territory. They’ve won and been nominated for numerous
awards, including a 2019 JUNO Award nomination for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year
for Seeker and a 2021 Best of Moose Jaw Award for Best Musical Artist. The recognition back
home is in no small part due to her long and winding history of hitting the road, where she’s
done international showcases in the United States, the UK, Germany, and Estonia on top of
countless gigs in Canada’s small towns and sprawling metropolises. With everyone’s health top
of mind on the touring schedule to come, rest assured you’ll be able to see them—and hear
Soft Focus Futures live—the minute she’s able to safely hit your town.