We’ve written about Be Softly several times here at VSF, the Bristol collective and label which works to set poetry to music. Be it through collaboration, as with their album with Sam Pink, or using their own words, their striking and supple blend of ambient and post-rock serves as the perfect support for the spoken word delivery—lifting up the writing and lending further weight to its messages—and carving out a new space for contemporary poetry that’s far from the archaic, school-taught verses that, for many, have come to represent the form.
This time, Be Softly has teamed up with Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf to create Unfinished Apology Letters, a product of transatlantic communication and eventually friendship. Graduating from Loyola University New Orleans this year and since moving to Los Angeles, Blair-Schlagenhauf is the author of Chlamydia Summer and the co-founder of Tenderness Lit. Her work explores the twin forces of alienation and connection, as though loneliness explained well enough can be in salve in itself. The idea is wholly apparent on this collaborative record, as the album’s press release states:
Unfinished Apology Letters is about trying and failing and sometimes just not knowing what to do to help the ones you love most. But it’s also about the healing power of art and the joy that accompanies collaboration. It represents the solace we can find in the people who believe in us.
Opening track ‘Best Friend’s Vomit’ attempts to re-personalise the opioid crisis, moving away from the nebulous, far-away feel of stark headlines and dire open-eds, centring mundane life as Ground Zero for the tragedy. Indeed, Blair-Schlagenhauf draws upon image of 9/11 to force home this idea, the violence and suffering not some cultural norm or self-chosen curse, but rather a precipitation of far vaguer problems that lurk beneath our culture.
“A Yahoo article tells me that with 142 deaths a day, it is equivalent to 9/11 happening every three weeks,” Blair-Schlagenhauf says, her tone simple, kind of far-off, as though speaking more to herself, testing out the words, thinking it all through. “Because we can only measure things in terms of the worse thing that has ever happened ever.” Only, the Worst Thing Ever is something that happens on TV, impersonal and awesome, and this is not that. “But I’m crying,” she continues, “because I can only measure things in your names, or the amount of unfinished apology letters that selfishly sit with the lights on in my Google drive, like when I sit in my parked car for too long, hoping I’ll never have to go inside.”
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‘g.o.m.’ is a slow shuffling track pitched somewhere between warmth and animosity, as though the two emotions are not so far apart, or two sides of the same coin. Blair-Schlagenhauf’s writing is keyed into such as idea, her daydreams tending toward violence or love, her thoughts toward diving in front of speeding cars. “I don’t want to die,” she explains flatly. “I just think this would be a great way for all of my bones to feel the same way at once.”
Exploring the discrepancy between reality and the ideas of hold of it, ‘falling’ is chock full of phony images and our pining for their truth, while ‘water molecules’ brightens with a slow dawning. The momentum in the repetitive structures lend something of a mantra-like quality, as though by stringing scientific facts into the correct arrangement, Blair-Schlagenhauf might unlock an answer that surpasses cold hard facts and get straight to the bloody beating heart.
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Unfinished Apology Letters is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. The proceeds of the album will be donated to Shatterproof, a US nonprofit dedicated to ending opioid crisis, and Mind, the UK mental health charity.