Leanne Hoffman performs a tightrope walk between the sensual immediacy of pop music and poetry’s revelatory nuance on The Text Collector. Using the swirling melodies and glitzed-up production of Top 40, The Nova Scotia-based multidisciplinary artist builds tension between soundscapes primed for pure pleasure and lyrics that address the interconnected relationship between desire and despair. The album is a marked departure from her lush 2019 debut What Remains which won two Music Nova Scotia Awards and was nominated for an East Coast Music Award. Produced by award-winning producer Erin Costelo and Hoffman herself, The Text Collector deconstructs poetry and pop music, rebuilding the pieces into a listening experience even richer than the sum of its parts. The album was written from a poetry project where Hoffman wrote one poem a day for 365 days. Those poems are now published in a book called “The Text Collector: An Anthology”. In addition to the written work and the songs, The Text Collector was accompanied by eight art pieces, handmade by Hoffman. Each piece represents a song and the initial poem that it was created from. By pressing light up against dark until it’s evident they’re just different parts of a multi-faceted whole, Hoffman dismantles illusions of duality on her sophomore record, clearing space to meet her feelings on their own terms instead of forcing them into a box.