We don’t know who we are, I suppose we’re still learning / It’s too dark to see what’s in front of me. There’s a bright star burning, the earth is still turning.
Best known as the songwriter and lead of Baltimore indie rock band Outer Spaces, Cara Beth Satalino spent the last fifteen years living a strangely predictable existence. Playing shows, writing and releasing records, attempting to follow an assumed blueprint as to what a musician’s life should look like. Eventually Satalino decided to get out, upping roots and moving to New Jersey with partner and fellow Outer Spaces member Chester Gwazda to go back to school and start a new chapter. But the universe had other plans, both on a personal and global scale. Satalino fell pregnant, was diagnosed with a chronic illness, and battled “looming mental health issues,” all while the pandemic hit and the world changed for pretty much everyone. Forced to drop out of school, she had to find a way to deal with all this upheaval.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Satalino took to writing songs, looking for solutions to the current turmoil by examining the present and delving into the past. Musically, she looked back to her earliest influences, namely her upbringing in upstate New York where her father (himself an accomplished instrumentalist) immersed her in what she describes as “the vibrations of fiddle, banjo, guitars and mandolin.” Working in this traditional folk tradition felt like both a fresh start and a return to her roots. The unveiling of a true self that had previously sat beneath a noisier indie rock surface.
The result of this work is Little Green, a collection of ten of the most stripped back and vulnerable songs Satalino has ever written. There are gentle folk numbers and moments of warm and organic country rock, fleshed out with additional instrumentation (namely percussion, pedal steel and cello) from Gwazda, Angie Boylan, Nicholas Metz and Dan Kassel. But though the arrangements might sound like safe harbours from the chaos of the wider world, these are songs unafraid to face up to the deepening sense of uncertainty which marks our times. As though unease has wormed its way into our most personal, comforting habits in the day-to-day.
“I would take daily walks to to watch a family of eagles in their nest, tending to their eggs,” Satalino describes of the period in late 2020 when she escaped the city to stay with family. “The world felt big to me at the time, like it had its own agenda and we were all just along for the ride.” Tracks like ‘The Great Liberator’, which directly references this time, are imbued with such a mood, their warm fondness chilled by the shadow of impending change as it looms above. “Things felt like they had reached a standstill and yet we knew things were changed and changing,” she continues. “Like pushing a big boulder toward the edge of a cliff, it was difficult to move it, but soon it would be free falling at breakneck speed into the abyss.”
It goes around and round again
It’s all begun to change again
The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. “I float above my body like a tetherball,” she sings in a typically wry line on opener ‘Warmth of a Golden Sun’. Or the opening lines of ‘Time’—“Got plenty of things to get into, when time abides and fear subsides, I’m a block of ice just melting in my shoes”—a track which explores old fears and uncertainties with a deceptively light hand, turning philosophical musings on the unstoppable march of the clock into something warm and buoyant and hopeful.
Nowhere is this balance more apparent than on the title track. A slow, hushed song which exudes a kind of bravery and self-acceptance with its dawning richness, embracing frailty rather than trying to hide it and finding some semblance of freedom in dropping such pretences. “It’s partly about finding compassion for myself as a young person, despite all my mistakes and troubles,” Satalino says of the song. “It’s saying something about identity: who we tell ourselves we are, how limiting those perceptions can be and how freeing it can feel sometimes to let go of them.” It’s a fitting encapsulation of the record as whole, soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.
Little Green is out now via Worried Songs. Get it from Bandcamp.
