In these confines, true love’s shadow still awaits. Cracked and fractured. Held anew and whole again sings Chelsea Wolfe of “Dusk.” The close of her seventh album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, “Dusk” marks the finality of a lush sonic waltz, a lengthier journey charged by cyclical contemplations on who stays and what cannot remain while one transcends and grows.
Produced by TV on the Radio guitarist Dave Andrew Sitek and mixed by Shawn Everett (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The War On Drugs), the album is sowed in a state of regeneration from the murmurs and grinds of opening “Whispers in the Echo Chamber”—Bathing in the blood of who I used to be / Offering up all my imperfect offerings / Become my own fantasy / Twist the old self into poetry—and shedding one’s exoskeleton on the trip-hop-pulsed “The Liminal” and its spectral reminder of all that we’ve become.
On the charging “House of Self-Undoing,” Wolfe faces sobriety, a direction she turned following the tour around her previous 2019 album Birth of Violence. “When you become sober after years of numbing out, you feel, deeply,” shared Wolfe in a previous statement, “the moments of joy are euphoric, and the moments of pain are more visceral. But it’s like a call to adventure, facing life fully present is exciting when you’ve spent half your life only half-present.”
“Unseen World,” Wolfe explores instinct and one’s “inner journey”—Ever-turning wheel / Binds our hands together / Wed the shadows to the light / As the pendulum swings to the tide—and is inspired by Marian Weinstein’s 1978 occult book Positive Magic. “She talks about the inner bell, your intuition, and the unseen world, this inner spiritual realm,” Wolfe tells American Songwriter, “and I wanted to explore that in a simplistic way. It reflected that sort of inner journey.”
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[RELATED: Check out Chelsea Wolfe’s 2015 Interview with American Songwriter]
The 10 stories within She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She are not-so-much about confines but broken chains and the procession and processing of it all as on “Everything Turns Blue”—I’ve been living without you here and it’s alright / I’d been looking for a way out a long time.
“While they are very personal, I understood that what I was writing about were very universal themes,” says Wolfe. “I knew that a lot of people would be going through the same kinds of challenges and transformations in their own lives, so it feels good knowing that there’s going to be a connection when I sing these songs.”
Distorted cadences feed into some of the more vulnerable states that follow through She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. From the start, the journey of the song started somewhere and sonically landed in a completely different space for Wolfe. “At one point there was this specific journey that these songs were going on,” shares Wolfe. “I needed them to be in a certain order, but then I started to get a bit looser with it, and a little bit more open to interpretation. The first half of the album was more like an urgency and a letting go, a shedding. Then right in the middle is the song, ‘The Liminal,’ which is really about that middle, that in-between place that this album resides. The second half is more accepting and a bit calmer.”
She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She was originally written by Wolfe remotely during the pandemic along with longtime collaborators, multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm, guitarist Bryan Tulao, and drummer Jessica Lynae Gowrie, before heading to the studio with Sitek in early 2022.
“We had a lot of time to spend working on the demos and sending ideas back and forth, then to my main collaborator, Ben Chisholm,” says Wolfe of the four years in the making of She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. “I was collaging all the ideas together into songs. Once we were finally able to work with a producer, I’d almost spent too much time with the songs where I needed that fresh energy and outlook to be injected into them.”
By the time Wolfe brought the songs to Sitek she had already spent two years with them and moved through another process in the arrangements. “He’s got a very experimental way of just kind of throwing ideas out there—playing with synths and samplers, and for hours and hours,” says Wolfe of Sitek.
“It was another long process working with him [Sitek] because I was a bit ready to finish the songs after working on them for two years, but I loved how they transformed in the studio, running through these walls of modular and analog synths” she adds. “There were all these experimental, fun things that brought a lot of new life to the songs and gave them an almost trip-hop, electronic feel, and less rock than they originally were.”
From the beginning, Wolfe insists the songs were like “teachers” and “guides” for her. “As soon as I wrote a song, this album would demand me to start living what I was writing about,” shares Wolfe. “And so through that process, I was just learning so much and changing so quickly.”
She continues, “Honestly, I still feel like I’m in that process. The songs have so much to teach me.”
To capture the visual side around several tracks, the videos for “Whispers in the Echo Chamber” and “Tunnel Lights” were filmed at the Chingaza National Park just outside of Bogotá, Colombia on the Eastern ranges of the Andes Mountains. Directed by George Gallardo Kattah, Wolfe also added another texture to the latter “Dusk,” filming an acoustic version of the song within the páramo or alpine tundra in the park.
For the title, Wolfe wanted to reflect the past self reaching out to the future self but couldn’t distill it down into one word or a shorter phrase. “I took the ‘who’ out and realized that it could be written in this sort of infinite loop, which made sense for the reaching out to the selves and the incarnation of the selves in the way since this album is about healing,” she says, “but in the way that healing is cyclical, not a straight thing.”
Despite the healing and enlightening properties of the album, Wolfe says she’s still “in it,” the healing, and in a “very liminal” and “in-between” space. “I talk about the void space and how it’s this sort of emptiness that’s full of potential and that’s how this feels for me,” says Wolfe. “I’m very much on the threshold between old and new. I can’t go back to the way things were before, but I’m not quite stepping into the full newness yet, and I’m kind of okay with that. I’m enjoying this sort of in-between space and not rushing. Just knowing that there are all these potential possibilities and mysteries ahead is enough for me.”
Wolfe adds, “You’re never just going to be healed. You’re going to have to keep repeating these patterns and things are going to creep back up, even when you think you’ve healed them.”
Photo: Ebru Yildiz / Courtesy of Pitch Perfect PR
