Romantic Piano follows Margaret’s acclaimed 2020 album, Mia Gargaret

Romantic Piano, the new album from Chicago-based musician Gia Margaret, is out now on Jagjaguwar. In conjunction, Margaret presents the video for album standout “City Song.” Romantic Piano follows Margaret’s acclaimed 2020 album, Mia Gargaret, and was teased by lead singles “Hinoki Wood b/w Cicadas.” Romantic Piano’s spare, gentle works evoke a classic sensibility; its compositions conjure the sublime themes of Romantic poets: solitude in nature, nature’s ability to heal and to teach; a sense of contended melancholy. Romantic Piano is curious, calming, patient and incredibly moving — but it doesn’t overstay its welcome for more than a second.

With one arm reaching out,

I can almost feel you

Of “City Song,” Margaret says: “‘City Song’ song feels heavier than the other songs on Romantic Piano in the same way that being in the city feels much heavier to me than being out in an open field. I thought it could serve as a more potent pause in a lighter natured sequence of music. An inversion to the way an instrumental song can serve as a brief but necessary moment of lightness in a heavier lyric-based record. It is partly reflective on core memory. It seems both random and fated that a passing moment can mean so much later on (and sometimes forever!). More abstractly, this song ponders a strange occurrence I’ve experienced: that a flash of memory can feel like a message from a spirit/guardian of someone or something beyond me.”

In the arches up, of the old hotel, the revolving doors in a tentative spell And the birds fly high/ we stay up all night With one arm reaching out I can almost feel you. I can almost feel you. I can’t really say where the memories fade, But some are burnt into my brain. I can’t really say what they meant to me, But now I’ll never be the same. In a flashback, I saw you With so much to tell. The revolving doors hit, in a tentative spell. And the birds still fly/ I stay up all night And with one arm reaching out I can almost feel you. I can almost feel you. I can’t really say where the memories fade, But some are burnt into my brain. I can’t really place what they meant to me, But now I’ll never be the same.

Margaret’s debut, 2019’s There’s Always Glimmer, was a lyrical wonder, but when an illness on tour left her unable to sing, she made Mia Gargaret, her ambient album which revealed a keen intuition for arrangement and composition not fully shown on Glimmer’s lyrical songs. Romantic Piano, too, is almost totally without words. “Writing instrumental music, in general, is a much more joyful process than I find in lyrical songwriting,” she says. “The process ultimately affects my songwriting.” And while Margaret has more songwriterly material on the way, Romantic Piano solidifies her as a compositional force.

Originally pursuing a degree in composition, Margaret dropped out of music school halfway through. “I really didn’t want to play in an orchestra,” she said of her decision, “I really just wanted to write movie scores. Then, I started to focus more and more on being a songwriter. Romantic Piano scratched an old itch.” Romantic Piano does indeed touch on a rare feeling in art often only reserved for the cinema — a simultaneous wide-lens awe of existence and the post-language intimate inner monologue of being.