Rising Sun Presents: Molly Parden, Eliza Edens, Louisa Stancioff
City Winery Philadelphia and Rising Sun Presents: Molly Parden, Eliza Edens, Louisa Stancioff live on February 18th at 7:30pm
Autumn is an auspicious season for nostalgia, and Molly Parden’s new album Sacramented opens with late year sunshine and an invitation to reverie: Wash me in rosemary / you come to me when I sleep / for the last 200 nights / I’ve seen you in every one of my dreams… Across the work, Molly pulls close the memory of love and love lost, but she sings like someone who has made peace with both. If her Rosemary EP (2020) was a tribute to grief in the undertow, Sacramented sees her out past those tumbling breakers, floating on her back. Molly’s voice is immaculate, as is the production arc of the record, thanks to her producer and mix engineer, Micah Tawlks. The core team of musicians –Tawlks, Dan Burns, and Kevin Dailey– are some of her closest friends in Nashville, in addition to longtime comrades and collaborators Juan Solorzano, Jason Goforth and Ben Kaufman (distinctly heard throughout Rosemary) each making guest appearances, making it feel like another Tuesday night in the small eclectic music town they have inhabited together for the last decade. Their arrangements are generous and unhurried and perhaps constitute a memorial to the end of an era for Parden,her having recently relocated to western Massachusetts. On Sacramented, Molly holds emotional tension like a master weaver. In “Dandy Blend” she juxtaposes the devastating past with the simple, human present: Thought that I would never get over him / Put a little honey in my Dandy Blend… Adding honey, she seems to be making the best of her days. Maybe things aren’t fully settled, but that’s okay—and she’s okay. The world and thoughts that Molly paints become so immediate that the 60s era piano, tambourine and flute interlude make more sense than anything. (Dandy Blend, don’t sleep on this song.)
On Eliza Edens’ sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers, she seeks to understand what happens after the end. Whether grappling with heartache or a loved one's mortality, the Brooklyn-based songwriter reimagines endings not as finite events but as devotional experiences that give way to new beginnings. Edens takes inspiration from folk luminaries such as Nick Drake, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotten, sowing her compositions with introspection born from her own grief. What emerges is a glowing collection of songs that serve as a map through tumult, toward hope. Edens sings and writes with an equally tender reverie as in her 2020 debut album Time Away From Time. But where We’ll Become the Flowers diverges, is in its narrative vulnerability. Each song is bursting: with sorrow, with anger, with the miracle of existence. “I wrote this album out of emotional necessity,” Edens says. "I had just gone through a breakup. And around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. I was spending a lot of my time trying to understand what it means to watch the hopeful person who raised me seem to slowly fade away before my eyes.” As the pandemic loomed, Edens turned to music: "This project was a rope I used to pull myself out of misery, to view the despair I was feeling from a different angle. It was also my escape.”
When We Were Looking, the highly anticipated debut record (to be released via Yep Roc Records), was written and recorded through a period of heartbreak and uncertainty, the collection is the raw and unflinching work of a nomadic soul who spent stints living in Alaska, California, New York, and North Carolina before returning home to her native Maine, one that holds nothing back in its bittersweet reckonings with pain, healing, acceptance, and growth. Stancioff writes with a cinematic eye here, conjuring up richly detailed stagings for her emotionally-charged character studies, and the guitar-and-synth-focused arrangements are immersive and nuanced to match, thanks in part to the evocative sonic landscaping of producer/keyboardist Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter, Craig Finn), who proves to be an ideal creative foil on the record. Add it all up and you’ve got a dreamy, nostalgic Polaroid of an album that blurs the lines between indie stoicism and folk sincerity, a lush, cathartic work that hints at everything from Phoebe Bridgers and Arlo Parks to Big Thief and Waxahatchee as it learns to find the beauty in grief and rebirth.
ADV $18 / DOS $20
