"Prophetess" is the first single from the record Michael and the Prophetess, to be released June 14 at Kung Fu Necktie, Philadelphia.

“Sarai,” available here as a digital exclusive bonus track, is a remix of the song “Sarah” from the album A Promise (2012): store.thechairmandances.com/track/sarah-sarahs-husband.

All sounds in the remix were derived from the session tracks of the original recording. Remix, arrangement, and additional production by Chris Van.

About the band:
One year after the release of their critically heralded A Promise, Philly art-rockers The Chairman Dances are back with Michael and the Prophetess, a song cycle steeped in biblical language and set in a fictionalized 1950s era Brooklyn. Upping the ante from previous efforts, the album includes an arsenal of strings and brass that spin out recurring melodies, mirroring the narrative and giving a sense of wholeness and depth to the work. The crystalline production, too, is an advancement and a step toward the pop idiom, which is fitting as Michael and the Prophetess finds the quartet moving ever-closer toward the pop aesthetic. College-radio singles abound and include the guitar driven “Prophetess” and “Wreck,” the tongue-in-cheek “My Life and the Postseason Collapse of the 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers,” and the Wilco-esque, alt-country crooner “Well-wisher.” If, as WXPN’s John Vettese avers, A Promise marks the band’s “graduation from indie songwriters to dramatic storytellers,” Michael and the Prophetess marks yet another progression, one that is both toward the abandoned album-as-story and, paradoxically, the very pop music audience that abandoned it.

Album synopsis:
Michael and the Prophetess, set in Brooklyn in 1956, is the coming-of-age story of a young man (Michael) who meets and interacts with biblical personalities in the blighted neighborhood of his upbringing. These interactions reveal a fantastic reality where mundane urban locales and everyday people act as signposts for the metaphysical.