We have featured the music of Mother Juniper, a recording project led by Lindsay Skedgell, several times in the last six months—first with debut single ‘Carolina’ and later with follow-up ‘Black Locust’. We described how they “use traditional folk influences and subtle ambient textures to conjure songs at once organic and ethereal,” and combine traits of myths, dreams and centuries-old folk tradition to conjure something that feels novel yet strangely timeless.
For their latest release, Parlor Songs, Mother Juniper teamed up with Doctor Delia, an artist based in Portland, Oregon who describes themselves as “an entity specializing in tinctures, alchemical transubstantiation, and old-time new-time music.” From that description alone it is plain to see Mother Juniper and Doctor Delia make the perfect creative partners. Together they crafted something subtly beautiful, a collection of lovingly home-recorded and truly collaborative songs which feel not quite of our time.
Indeed, as the title suggests, Parlor Songs is a throwback to another era, one before the wide availability of recorded music, where people had to sing and play to entertain each other. Recorded in a single day in “an old room with a red piano […] with one microphone in a boot, and one bottle,” the album possesses an intangible sense of homespun communal spirit. Its songs build from uncertain intros, often accentuated with whispered questions or comments between artists, into rhythms and flows which feel like something passing through the room.
Clocking in at just over 90 seconds, opener ‘Orange Tree’ is a wonderfully simple and sincere folk song. “Down by the orange tree” it begins “where the juice drips drips drips drips / I found a swarm of bees.” But it also displays the record’s stranger side too, a surreal sleep logic that melds reality and fantasy, imagined scenes becoming indistinguishable from the physical. The bees go on to live in the narrator’s head, take a trip to the south without ever stepping from beneath the orange tree.
Left town on a Saturday
drove down to New Orleans
and it seems we’ve been inside a dream
where the scenes skip skip skip skip skip
The rest of the album continues along a similar path, bringing together songs pre-written and songs made up on the day, simply crafted but enveloped in a veil of mystery. Some tracks, like ‘Bathtub Song’ are wordless and feel improvised, plucked from the ether in that quiet room, while others contain more distinctive storytelling. “There are things you’ll never know” goes ‘Steam Risin’ as it shuffles and shambles in tuneful disorder, feeling like something of a mission statement for the project, while ‘Old Morass’ slows things down with ponderous and poignant piano.
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Ultimately, Parlor Songs is an aural document of one place on one afternoon, a moment suspended in time forever. It captures the sound of the rain, of people beyond the old wooden windows, and the small magic conjured by Mother Juniper and Doctor Delia within. As the album’s blurb puts it:
Neither of them knows what will happen, but they begin on one Spring afternoon…It was a day on the precipice of the plague’s pause, which made the radio earthquake and the city swell. Right in that great edge of possibility we sometimes refer to as the unknown, they started singing.
Parlor Songs is out now and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.