Lo 2.0 by TJ Douglas

NEW YORK, NY — Beach Plum Tapes is proud to announce the June 10, 2022, release of singer-songwriter TJ Douglas’ heartrendingly brilliant Lo 2.0 on all digital formats, as well as a first-ever limited cassette edition of 100.

Lo 2.0 is Douglas’ fourth full-length LP, following such acclaimed releases as 2015’s Joey (“a tender meditation on youthful malaise” — Pitchfork) and 2017’s Our Lady Star of the Sea, Help and Protect Us ("an exercise in attentiveness… explores that dance between belief and nonbelief with earnest curiosity" — MTV News). First issued as a self-released project under the title Lo two years ago, the album has been remixed, remastered, and resequenced for Beach Plum Tapes as Lo 2.0, with a new, definitive 11-song tracklist that includes one previously unreleased song, the stunning “Stiff Drink Society.”

Lo 2.0 is an album of deep personal reckonings, slow-burn intensity, and unforgettable honesty about what Douglas describes as “this war between meaning and meaninglessness.” It’s a bold step forward from their earlier releases as Tica Douglas, embracing the full prophetic potential of rock music while simultaneously tapping into a new sense of personal truth.

Douglas first released Lo online in March 2020, the week the world shut down. “I’m glad that I released it then,” they reflect. “I think it was received by the people who care about my music with a lot of meaning in that moment of incredible anxiety and uncertainty and apocalyptic energy.”

They had written most of these songs in 2018 and 2019, after graduating from Union Theological Seminary with an M.Div degree. In the months following the initial online release, they embarked on a new journey as a hospital chaplain, providing spiritual care to patients near the end of their lives in New York City, and got sober. They began thinking about the next album. Still, they felt “something unresolved” in the album they had just released.

Douglas sees Lo now as a snapshot of where they were in early 2020, with no punches pulled: “The album is an acknowledgment of the pain that I carry, and the self-destructive tendencies, without me being fully acquainted with what those pains are.”

They mention “Take Heart,” the luminous ballad that opens the album with a frank admission of feeling completely lost. “I’m saying to the world, ‘I’m telling you that I’m fine. I’m actually not fine,’” Douglas observes. Later in the Lo 2.0 track sequence, songs like “You Are Not,” “Jackie Robinson,” and “Friend Breakup” delve further into the knottiest parts of Douglas’ emotional life. “On ‘Jackie Robinson,’ I’m saying, ‘I’m going to fuck up here. I don’t care.’ And I don’t love that part of myself,’” they say.

Working as a chaplain gave Douglas a new perspective on the interior conflicts chronicled on Lo. Soon they could see a path toward closure, a new vision of the album that answered some of the questions left open on its initial release. “All my albums are personal,” Douglas says. “But Lo is so much, ‘Here I am, here’s what’s going on with me and my shadows.’ Some of the songs on the original were important to release — this is my process, this is my vulnerability. But it didn’t feel as important to include those. The ones that I picked now are the final version.”

Lo 2.0 was remixed and remastered by Ryan Dieringer at Welterweight Sound Studio in New Paltz, New York. The cassette features artwork and design by Gracie Pizzo; musicians on the album include Douglas, Dieringer, Kyle Morgan, Rachel Housle, Jenny Nelson, and Julia Anrather.

"It was a liberating process to revisit Lo and address a shared feeling of unfinished business," Dieringer says. "I had some sonic ideas that had been percolating, and I fed off this spirit of renewal and the sense that we were playing by our own rules. It was instantly clear how the final collection wanted to sound."

Adds Douglas: “Lo is filled with those unhealed parts of myself, on display. In the last two years, through sobriety, being a chaplain, and cultivating my own practices, I've been getting to know these parts better and starting to heal them. And I think this new release is part of that process.”

(formerly known as tica douglas).

ticadouglas.com