BIO
Skye Steele spent the last decade in New York City forging a reputation as a musicians’ musician, working his way up from playing subway platforms to Carnegie Hall and collaborating with a dizzying array of artists. He has appeared on stage with household-names like Willie Nelson and Vanessa Carlton, indie darlings Deer Tick, Jolie Holland and Shearwater, and legends of avant-garde jazz Anthony Braxton and Butch Morris.
In 2014, Skye began forging a new path as a solo performer and songwriter, trading in concert halls, jazz festivals, and a well-stamped passport for DIY venues and long stretches of American highway. He sweated out this reinvention the old-fashioned way, criss-crossing the country and refining his new sound on stage in punk-rock basements, galactic hippie-communes, and boom town honky-tonks.
In January 2015, he released Up From The Bitterroot, a collection of sprawling folk-art songs that chronicled the unraveling of his marriage, written during a winter spent hiding out in a log cabin in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Recorded almost entirely in two days with a live band of seasoned improvisers from New York’s jazz world, Bitterroot also captures a moment of transition musically for Skye from his roots as a violinist in that scene to a vocation for songwriting. A week after celebrating the album’s release with a 10-piece all-star band, Skye emptied out the home and studio he’d kept in Brooklyn for nine years, piled instruments into his car and hit the road full-time.
That summer, Skye found himself back in Montana with a free month between tours, so he returned to the same cabin in the Bitterroot to write. This time it was July instead of January, and the change in season in his own life was as dramatic as in the landscape. On his first day in the woods he wrote “Back In The Valley,” which would become the album opener:
I’m back in the valley, down off the mountainside–
Storm carried me up there in winter and dropped me to sparkle and shine,
waiting for springtime.
Back in the valley, called out by the sun–
Dressing the trees up in emeralds to dance on the branches,
sucking up light into our blood.
By the end of the month he had twenty new songs demoed, but it wasn’t until the following Spring when he would take a break from touring to spend six weeks in LA recording them. This was a dramatically different project from his first LP. Skye was in the studio alone with one of his oldest friends, the guitarist and producer Cassorla (Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Blitzen Trapper, Taylor Goldsmith). The two poured over the songs and arrangements in meticulous detail, playing all the instruments themselves.
The folk instrumentation of Bitterroot gave way to 808 beats and skronky synths. Improvised flourishes were replaced with lush orchestral string arrangements Skye composed and recorded part by part. A few friends dropped in to make guest appearances— Jolie Holland sang a duet, Vanessa Carlton added harmonies and a ghostly chorus to a tune, and the rhythm section from Skye’s first band in New York added bass and drums to another.
All That Light is an album that looks outward and upward, praising nature and life cycles and the subatomic interplay of energy and matter. There are a few love songs mixed in, but the one that stands out for its ardor is “At The Waterfall,” an oedipal ode to the Earth, inspired by a Brazilian Candomblé chant to the sea-goddess Iemanjá. Fans of Jolie Holland will be surprised and delighted by her verse on the dancehall-inflected duet “Stay With Me.” There is a call-back to the searing confessionals of Bitterroot in “I Wish You Well,” a letter to a long-estranged partner. And “All That Light,” The title track, stomps and swaggers over synth-bass and crowd-shouted chorus as Skye declares,
“invisible and indivisible,
we send light flying all over,
but we’re not here at all—
oh baby, it’s aaaaall that light.”
This ecstasy of contradictions is emblematic of the album’s sonic perspective too– yes, this folk song can groove over some hyper-saturated Moog bass. Sure, these Copland strings will fit under that glitchy drum loop. And if putting these things together is actually not that big a deal, maybe this strengthens the case made throughout this record, that a sense of oneness is actually a simple and intimate experience, and the vast impossibilities of life’s blooming are as close at hand as the light arriving this moment into your eye.
MUSIC
PHOTOS
