During time in the Peruvian Amazon, Joanna Schubert met the Oropendola, a genus of New World blackbird named for the pendulum-like nature of their swinging nests, and soon the Brooklyn-based singer, keyboardist, composer, arranger and educator adopted the name. “The bird’s song, which filled her mornings and filtered into her dreams,” as Nandi Rose writes in the liner notes of the debut Oropendola album, Waiting For The Sky to Speak, “was a complex and mesmerizing mix of textures that seemed to encapsulate the entirety of existence—from birth’s first gurgle to death’s final rattle.” Pendulums in more than nomenclature, oscillating between poles with something like grace.
With an agile fluidity of its own, Waiting For The Sky to Speak takes this idea to heart. A collection of songs which dances between the hard binaries of life, be it presence and absence, past and future, life and death, and embraces the ephemeral as a kind of freedom. Only in committing to the pendulum’s motion can we beat the finality at either pole of its swing.
Single ‘Knocking Down Flowers’ is the perfect introduction to the record. A song which came into being when Schubert started her own version of Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages’ activity from The Artist’s Way, recording improvised pieces each day. “I recorded morning pages #1 soon after a pivotal, complicated, on-and-off relationship reached its end,” Schubert explains. “Round and round we went, addicted to one another, unable to break free of a sticky cycle that prevented us from fully blooming together. That song seed turned into ‘Knocking Down Flowers’ within a few days.”
The intuitive process is perhaps unsurprising given the inherently personal nature of the song. “There was a construction site near my old apartment in South Slope, Brooklyn that the two of us would often pass by,” Schubert continues. “We developed a bit—bittersweet in retrospect—that it was our home:
We would peer through the diamond-shaped opening at the stunted barren landscape beyond and imagine the possibilities. Dirt, trash, patches of weeds, colorful graffiti on the green walls, the droning hum of the Prospect Expressway: our weird little insular paradise. One evening, the site’s door was slightly ajar. We made it inside of our home, for the first and only time, photographing one another, running around and dancing with abandon, beers in hands reaching towards the sky.
The single exists within such a space. Somewhere outside of the present but not quite the past or future either—something like liminal space of a pendulum’s arc. A kind of pocket between periods where consequences are suspended, and nothing is risked in dreaming.
Waiting for the Sky to Speak is out on the 17th March via Spirit House Records and Wilbur & Moore Records and you can pre-order it now from the Oropendola Bandcamp page.
