Sally Shapiro Quits Touring, Begins Work On New Album

BY Brock ThiessenPublished Feb 5, 2009

After a bit of the old silent treatment, Sally Shapiro finally emerged today to drop us a line, and with it comes a bit a good news and a bit of bad.

First for the bad. Sweden's starry-eyed disco queen will no longer be gracing the stage, she says, telling us that she's tired of the whole touring thing and will from now on be spending her days living like a normal person with a normal job (and picking blueberries on the weekend). But as for the good stuff, Sally Shapiro has announced she has new album coming our way, and in fact, it's almost done.

In a new post on Shapiro's website, here's what the singer and her producer bud Johan Agebjörn have to say about the return to a no-tour policy:

After coming home from our short DJ tour last spring, Sally felt that standing on stage was not her thing, and that life on tour in general didn't interest her. It was not just about shyness, it was as much about a disinterest in endless travelling and working hours in the middle of the night. Some of the live/DJ requests turned into Johan solo DJ gigs, most didn't happen at all. Many people in the music industry think it's commercially stupid, we lose a lot of opportunities to gain listeners and sell records. And we guess they are right. We also have the feeling of making our listeners (the ones that we met were really nice) disappointed. But we believe that you shouldn't take opportunities just because they exist, if it's not what you really want to do. What if you just want to be a normal person with a normal job, record songs in the weekends, and spend the holidays picking blueberries instead of going on tour?

Well, apparently the answer to that is where the new album comes in. The pair say they've been recording tracks for the last year during the weekends, with Agebjörn doing the solo DJ thing every once in a while (like he'll continue to do) and both rediscovering "the joy of making music," as they put it. "Most of the new album is finished and it will be released some time this year and probably a single before that," the Shapiro camp explains about the follow-up to Disco Romance. "It will hopefully make you fall in love with the person sitting next to you on the bus."

There's no firm release date yet for the as-yet-untitled record, but it will be released in North America on Paper Bag Records, with Husmus Media handling it in Scandinavia and Permanent Vacation in the rest of Europe. If you'd like a little play-by-play, the duo also tell us that they've joined the Twitter bandwagon, so you can check boring stuff like "the new single is getting mastered," "Johan just went to a great crayfish party" or other seemingly insignificant details.

Sally Shapiro "Hold Me So Tight"

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