Ava Mirzadegan debuts with the lovely ‘Dark Dark Blue’ on Team Love Records

The new album Dark Dark Blue catalogs ten songs Philly singer-songwriter Ava Mirzadegan recorded inside her childhood bedroom while leaving a “tumultuous relationship.” Originally captured on her phone in 2019 and 2020, she recreated those voice memos “over the course of 24 cold, rainy hours in Biddeford, Maine” with her friend Michael Cormier (drummer of Friendship, guitarist and songwriter of Hour) and partner Jason Calhoun. “It took me a long time to feel ready to record and sit with these songs again,” she shares. The album is out today on New Paltz indie label Team Love Records.

Mirzadegan has spent years living and performing in Philadelphia, and she previously released her own music under the name Pen Palindrome as well as other artists’ music under her Oof Records label. But she says the release of Dark Dark — her first release under her given name — feels more personal than those projects, and the use of her own name reflects that new “conscious vulnerability.” In the studio, she, Calhoun and Cormier played several instruments but left only her voice and acoustic guitar on the record because “the more we sat with it, the more it made sense to leave it be as it was written—entirely on my own.”

The result is a lovely, spare collection of lyrics evolving over one tender guitar, like a long-awaited conversation in a small room. Mirzadegan talks through feelings of awkwardness, misery and regret, often from an “I” to a “you.” (“I’d like to cook you up / couldn’t light the stove.”) The more space she leaves for breathing, the wider her couplets unfold and the older they grow. All the while, she plucks colorful chords with common tones that drone, every note tucked in together as if under one blanket. Especially when seasons turn, this style of guitar always brings me a sense of stillness against the sway of time, as strings keep tap-tap-tapping on without pointing to any resolution. Likewise, Mirzadegan writes focused on the present and the remembered, not finding an end.

Dark Dark Blue is out today on Team Love Records. Ava Mirzadegan plays seven shows on the east coast in November to support her album release, including in Philadelphia November 14th at Johnny Brenda’s with locals 22º Halo and Ther. Find Mirzadegan’s video for “Book Song” below, filmed at House of Our Own Books in West Philadelphia.