22° Halo‘s Garden Bed made our list of favourite albums in 2021. A record “fond and quietly contemplative, strangely familiar and hopeful in a manner not quite explicable,” as we put it, with “songs easy to be around and easier to return to, comforting in the very fact they exist.” Led by Philadelphia-based Will Kennedy, the project mixes the various sensibilities of lo-fi pop and slowcore to achieve this bright yet ambiguous sound, and thus finds itself capable of exploring complex and often difficult themes from a novel perspective.
Following a series of collaborations with Joel Johnston of Far Caspian, 22° Halo are now releasing a new single with Johnston’s label Tiny Library Records. Titled ‘Bird Sanctuary’, it finds Kennedy doing what he does best, a gentle duet with wife Kate Schneider that sparkles like a gem. He describes the song as one “about listening and not listening,” taking material he wrote around the theme of his wife’s experiences with severe illness. This is referred to only elliptically, with short, sentence-long “verses” that Kennedy delivers in between Schneider singing the chorus. “The thing you try and tell me breaks up with the wind,” he sings at the very beginning. “Say it again.”
But ultimately the heavy stuff is not the lasting feeling. Or at least it doesn’t drag you down in the way you might expect. It’s leavened into something uplifting with that trademark 22° Halo sense of almost naive wonder at the simple things all around us. “Saw the sparrows in alley picking twigs up,” Schneider sings during the chorus. “Are you listening?” It’s as if, at some very basic and intuitive level, Kennedy taps into the stuff that’s really important. Getting lost in the present, side by side with those you love.
‘Bird Sanctuary’ is out now via Tiny Library Records.