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In a world orbited by two moons, lunar phases dance in tandem, tugging at the tides.
Beneath these amulets of light lies the landscape in which SAINTSENECA’s new album Highwallow & Supermoon Songs came to be.
Bandleader Zac Little had been struggling, stalled out creatively and disconnected. Songwriting completely halted and depression took hold.
“Art is like my bicycle powered lightbulb - always pedaling away, pushing back the grey gloom. Sometimes the chain breaks. Music didn’t sound good. It freaked me out. I always had used creativity as a vehicle to metabolize my emotions and experiences - process, digest, and move forward. Now it wasn’t working. This world gets heavy. Everyone falls into the pit at some point. I got crushed under the weight of something I couldn’t sing myself out of.”
What’s an artist that doesn’t make art? He found himself asking:
“What if I don’t do the thing that I thought made me, me?”
While on a walk he found a pen tucked against the curb. It wasn’t special, yet he felt an invitation to pick it up. He took it home and set it to paper, surprised by its vibrant green offering.
“I loved the way it looked, the way it would glide when the ink flowed. It felt good to just let go.”
He began creating again in this spirit, painting monochrome rings expanding on the page like echoes.
“I was weaving a naive little matrix, painting not so much what a flower looks like but how it feels.”
They were contemplations unfurling in patterns and waves, no agenda, just delight in color upon color until an image appeared. At first it was fish, then fish gave way to flower heads.
The practice was healing, footholds on which to climb up. The paintings amassed into a small collection, enough for an art show he displayed at a hospital. The solo exhibition inspired Little to paint all of the album's artwork on the beautiful gatefold jacket.
“Joy and creativity loop back around… like lunar phases, hidden and then seen. Always felt.”
The recording process began at Little’s home studio in Columbus, OH, working with producer Mike Mogis on mixes as well as repeat collaborator producer/engineer Glenn Davis. Like the green ink pen, the songs felt more found than written.
“I wanted this album to reflect that- some songs were found on the landscape, others were found on two moons, orbiting that landscape like satellites, disparate pieces pulling on each other, creating a world of song.”
The landscape consists of tracks 1-10, including Sweet Nothing, a nearly perfect nugget of breezy pop perfection, written on he and wife Leticia Wiggin’s (album credits in parenthesis here) honeymoon. The birth of their first child coincides with the making of the album, making a debut on BITTER SWEET; a 7 minute twisted-folk ripper that ends with a sample of their newborn’s heartbeat in utero.
He placed the next 12 songs on two different moons. Songs that had colors, green and orange: Viridian Moon and Cinnamon Moon.
Little’s relationship to color is strong and a thread through the new album. If not Synesthesia, then nearly. As he sings on “Holyhock”:
Hidden in the ground right now / A hundred-something blossoms begging to shout / In wild magenta meant just like it sounds
Little recalls the early spring blossom around the time he began to write again:
“The color cut hard to my core, making its mark… zinging on some secret sting.”
Viridian Moon contains tracks 11-16, including Battery Lifer, a track beautifully drenched in effects, moving into a genre that could be called Shoe Grass or Blue Gaze. A sweet melody moves lazily between the morphing duet of Little and bandmate Jessi Bream. Ethereal tones weave their way through the intoxicating arrangement, a standout on the album and a full immersion into the dually lit sound world.
Saintseneca began in the Appalachian foothills of rural Southeast Ohio.
“I was a kid way out in the middle of nowhere, alone in a haunted farmhouse at night.”
Little’s experiences as a teenager in this setting have remained vivid, informing their catalog that begins with a self released, self-titled EP in 2009. After relocating and reforming in Columbus, Ohio, the band earned a dedicated following, performing intimate and charged sets of string driven DIY indie-folk. Crisscrossing the country in a car on tour brought them national attention, connecting them to Portland, OR based Mama Bird Recording Co., who released their first full-length, LAST.
In 2014 the band signed with ANTI- releasing their critically acclaimed LP Dark Arc, earning high praise from Pitchfork and landing a NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Their LP Such Things and the Mallwalker EP followed with 2018’s pinnacle Pillar of Na closing their stint with ANTI-.
Highwallow & Super Moon Songs, their first for Philadelphia indie label Lame-O Records, lands as Saintseneca’s most realized release to date, a twenty-one song opus that is more adventurous than anything prior, yet primed with a pop sense that makes accessing this expansive sonic world effortless. It’s familiar on the landscape but there’s more gravity. Two moons. Strings and synth side by side with drum machine and samples. Unamericana.
“I found that I circled back to the country music that I grew up listening to and always wanted to run from- but then I just wanted to hear it. The voice of George Jones - raw and razor sharp with emotion, the alchemical perfection of Hank Williams’ song writing, Dolly Parton’s crushing melodies. They seemed to effortlessly cut through the air, floating in the atmosphere like perfume even after the songs stopped.
I kept hearing this music in my dreams. It was surreal and penetrating, sweet beyond words. I would wake up and feel it evaporate as I tried to hang on. There’s a way this traditional music sounded in my head and I wanted to coax it into this realm. Take it somewhere weird and true and complicated. The way it really is.”
Little comes off subtly at the surface but the craftsmanship in every phrase he drops is almost crushing. HIGHWALLLOW… finds his voice at its most elastic, riding the hills of home, buzzing by like a dragonfly, then laying low like an old farm dog.
On Hot Water Song he offers:
If it's true what they say / How the end will come some day / It's too true to be good
SAINTSENECA has a hallmark for lyrics that are hopeful yet obliterate that hope in the same verse, only to distill it again more potently by the end:
There's a hole way down / Where all the people like me have fallen / All in time we will climb back to the light
HIGHWALLLOW… is bookended by field recordings of a singing harp, one that Little impulsively bought at a used music shop in Columbus, Ohio. It was painted black. As he walked with it held overhead to his car, a gust of wind filled the frame and passed over the strings, sending a crescendo to the cosmos. He climbed on his garage roof with a recorder stuck in the harp and waited for the wind to blow again.
“For me that’s so much of what this album is; the longing to be inhabited by the spirits of creation.”
It was the return of songs, the entry into a world where living is creating.
“Every song that will ever be written already exists. It is simply a matter of becoming available for the wind to pass through you.”