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We Swallowed The Sky album artwork [Download]
Today, Beatrix releases her sophomore album We Swallowed The Sky via Nice Life Recording Company. Arielle Kasnetz, the LA-based singer-songwriter who goes by the moniker Beatrix, had to discover her own voice. For most of her life, she trained in classical music, spending hours practicing vocal scales and learning piano pieces. But the stories she told weren’t hers, the words and the feelings somebody else’s who had lived a long time ago. It wasn’t until the pandemic, stuck in her bedroom with an acoustic guitar that someone had gifted to her a few birthdays ago, that she began to try writing for herself.
Now, on her new album, she moves further into the recesses of her history, exploring a formative relationship from her past and the reverberations that it left. It’s the sound of a songwriter as committed to honesty and self-exploration as to constant musical progression.
“A lot of the time, when I write, it reveals stuff about me and about the world that I haven’t been fully aware of,” Kasnetz says. “I find that I can only really access that part of my brain through songwriting.”
After some time living in New York, Kasnetz moved to LA, where she knew nobody and was living with a mutual friend. But almost immediately, she fell into an inspiring community of musicians, including Philip Etherington, who would go on to co-produce We Swallowed The Sky alongside Ehren Ebbage. They recorded the core of each song as a trio, before taking select songs to a wider band which consisted of guitarists Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers) and Ryan Lerman (John Legend, Ben Folds, Vulfpeck), bassist Sean Hurley (John Mayer, Arlo Guthrie), drummer Rob Humphries (Kacey Musgraves), pianist Zac Rae (Death Cab For Cutie, Fiona Apple), pedal steel player Greg Leisz (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Rufus Wainwright), horns player CJ Camerieri (Paul Simon, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens), woodwinds player Jesse Chandler (Midlake, Mercury Rev) and string arranger Rob Moose (Sufjan Stevens, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z). “This record is really a collection of some of my favorite players ever, who have been a part of some of my favorite records ever; I feel so fortunate that they wanted to be a part of it,” Kasnetz says.
Together the group created an expansive, yearning sound that combines alternative singer-songwriter influences in the form of indie rock, folk and chamber-pop. The songs are striking and off-kilter, full of surprising melodic turns or boldly arranged instrumentals, and careening from hushed piano numbers to loud full-band blasts. “To me, what makes music great is this trifecta — interesting harmony, interesting lyrics, and also being hooky and singable and relatable. I strive to have all three,” says Kasnetz. The production soundscape is also immaculately crafted, with the album bearing a keen sense of atmosphere that takes inspiration from sources as far-flung as Jonny Greenwood’s Phantom Thread soundtrack, Flannery O’Connor’s poetry and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.
As if to demonstrate that, the album begins on “Ghosts of Tennessee,” a song that balances beauty and eeriness with its haunting strings and Kasnetz’s delicate, Carrie & Lowell-esque double-tracked vocals. It introduces the album’s connecting lyrical thread, in which Kasnetz revisits a long-gone relationship, letting its ghost become achingly present. It’s also the first appearance of Greg Leisz’s pedal steel, which becomes a motif of its own throughout We Swallowed The Sky. “Greg’s pedal steel functions as the ghost on the record; the thing that takes you somewhere between the past and the future that isn’t the present,” Kasnetz explains. The track is followed by “We Swallowed The Sky,” a foreboding Elliott Smith-like waltz which captures both the blossoming of a young love and the bitterness that has survived through the years. Kasnetz presents the album’s thesis statement when she sings, “I didn’t know you, and I never will.”
A trilogy of songs across the album form its backbone, as they tell a story of a breakup returning to haunt its subjects, of nonchalance and carelessness turning into regret year by year. First in the narrative is “Dead Dog”, the album’s most go-for-broke rock song on which Kasnetz breathtakingly exorcises her rage and pain. “Tell me I’m the only one, and throw it all away for fun like an idiot,” she belts on the chorus. “At one point while recording the vocal I looked up and Philip and Ehren were both filming me. Ehren said, ‘In case I am witnessing a moment in rock history,’” Kasnetz recalls.
The trilogy’s next act is “Class Reunion,” a track on which Kasnetz demonstrates her storytelling prowess as she paints a picture of the exes running into each other ten years on. “Sipping on a gin and tonic / Slip a hand into your pocket / Bet that you still think we’d make the perfect pair / And I don’t care,” she sings. Finally comes the Americana-inflected “Upstate”, on which we meet the ex still ruminating on his lost love after another ten years. Its breezy and upbeat musical backing belies its wistful lyrics: “If I end up back in Texas / At the bridge where we first kissed / I’ll just walk right under it and get over you.”
Giving that breeziness a carefree visual, the official video for “Upstate” will be released today at 9am PT. Contrasting a top-down, winding car ride from a day where everything seems to be going wrong, the self-directed cut is a moment of liberation on the album — Watch.
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