Last year we wrote a small piece about talk soon, the debut album by Chicago-based songwriter Carolina Chauffe’s project hemlock. Described as an “interstate phone-fi bedroom folk saga of sorts,” the record offered a picture “of a relationship as it changes over time and distance,” as we wrote in the piece, “providing snapshots of love in its various guises.” This might have been through its soft and reflective songs providing a level of detail only really shared in rambling answerphone messages, or, as in the case of songs like ‘merle’, the actual recorded messages themselves.
In celebration of the album’s first anniversary last month, hemlock released a brand new single ‘monarch’. A track originally intended to appear on talk soon, it’s a song that has had a long gestation period, following Chauffe as she’s moved from the swamps of Louisiana first to Oregon and then finally to Illinois like the migratory nature of the insect that gives it its title. Chauffe is joined by Andrew Krull on electric guitar and Seth Engel on bass, though the arrangement maintains a careful restraint, and the result channels the spirit of its namesake—so delicate in its immediate form yet possessing an underlying power too.
in the ebb and flow of sorrow
the loneliness not yours to keep,
but borrow
Photo by Erik Kommer