2x Brit Award-winning Keane co-founder and frontman Tom Chaplin has shared his eagerly awaited third solo album, MIDPOINT, available now via BMG at all DSPs and streaming services HERE.
Chaplin will celebrate MIDPOINT with a very special "Live to Vinyl with Mastercard" virtual recording session, to be livestreamed direct from London's iconic Metropolis Studios on Monday, September 12 at 20:00 BST. The event - available exclusively for Mastercard cardholders - will feature a once-in-a-lifetime virtual recording experience and intimate performance, along with a behind-the-scenes tour of Metropolis Studios. After the recording Chaplin will answer questions submitted via a virtual fan Q&A chat. Following the virtual experience, an exclusive limited-edition live recording 10" vinyl will be printed and shipped direct to fans. Complete details and ticket information can be found now HERE.
Produced by Ethan Johns (Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Laura Marling), MIDPOINT includes such emotionally charged new songs as the reflective title track, "Midpoint," joined by an official music video - directed by award-winning filmmaker Lucy Bridger and starring renowned Irish actress Niamh Cusack - streaming now at YouTube.
Chaplin and his band will mark the arrival of MIDPOINT with a series of UK headline dates beginning this October. For updates, please visit www.tomchaplinmusic.com.
Five albums and almost two decades fronting Keane have seen Tom Chaplin reach the heights of popular success and critical applause, from four consecutive times atop the UK charts and two trips to the winner's podium at the Brit Awards through sold out headline tours and performances at some of the world's most legendary venues.
As a solo singer-songwriter, Chaplin's 2016 debut, THE WAVE, proved a top 3 smash on the UK Official Albums Chart, swiftly followed a year later by TWELVE TALES OF CHRISTMAS, a holiday collection featuring eight Chaplin originals alongside inspired covers of festive standards. In addition, Chaplin recently appeared on the UK's International Emmy Award-winning edition of The Masked Singer, performing in the guise of a seven-foot, multi-colored Poodle (a tribute to his own family's beloved pet)
Recorded in six productive weeks at the end of last year in studios including Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Bath and Paul Epworth's The Church Studios in Crouch End, North London, MIDPOINT is the first Tom Chaplin solo album where the veteran musician truly presents all of himself - as a writer, a singer, a husband, a world-beating artist with a past (and all the ups and downs that come with it), and as a middle-aged man. Chaplin's songs of reflection and imagination, empathetically played by a small group of hand-picked supporting musicians, reveal an artist who finds himself at an equilibrium having worked hard to achieve balance in his life, including personal contentment - and long-term sobriety - in the Kent countryside with his family.
MIDPOINT first came to life after the pandemic put an abrupt halt to Keane's hugely anticipated North American tour supporting 2019's CAUSE AND EFFECT, their first new album after a seven year hiatus. Inspired by space, time, a changed world, and the arrival of he and his wife's second child that spring, the songs came quickly, and with them, a thematic framework for a new album. Minimal and evocative, with delicately picked guitar, spacey drums and washes of electronic soundscapes, songs like "Midpoint" and the rolling piano ballad, "New Flowers," reverberate with a gentle, embracing, universality, culminating with "Overshoot," a heart-breaking, heart-filling ode to staying the course and embracing the entirety of life's journey.
"There's a space for something that's nuanced," Tom Chaplin says, "that explores a part of life that everyone goes through. There are really interesting feelings and questions and emotions. If I can get some of that across, and it can resonate with something people are feeling in their lives - well, I'd be more than happy with that."
