If Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s beautifully spare debut album—2018’s At Weddings—was born of isolation, then her forthcoming Projections EP was born of community, or at least collaboration.
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The Los Angeles-via-Louisville singer-songwriter initially intended to work with different producers for each song on the EP, but ultimately entrusted all five tracks to her former tourmates Alex Gianascolli and Sam Acchione. The final product—out next month via Saddle Creek—is tender and intimate, pairing Tomberlin’s pensive songwriting and delicate vocals with soft, spindly instrumentation. The arrangements call to mind the quieter sides of fellow indie folk favorites Adrianne Lenker or Phoebe Bridgers.
“It’s all sacrifice and violence / the history of love,” Tomberlin sings in her haunting new single “Hours,” featured below. “That song was written in January or February of 2019,” Tomberlin told me over the phone a few weeks ago. “Songwriting in general is just a state of reflection for me, of processing the external and giving it time to be internal, then putting it into something. That can be really tedious emotional work, obviously, so sometimes it’s hard to step into that.”
We caught up with Tomberlin about her new EP, her favorite Pavement song, and her ongoing struggle to let herself be seen—both through her music and in her album / EP artwork. Check out the full interview and listen to “Hours” below.
American Songwriter: You said, of At Weddings, that “It all came from being super isolated,” adding “Something good had to come out of it or it could very much kill me. These songs came out of literal survival mode. Because I just needed to create something for myself while living there. It was kind of a shelter.” Did the songs on Projections come from a similar place?
I don’t think that they came from a similar place. Well, I take that back. “Sin”—I [wrote] that song around the time that I had been writing At Weddings. Same with “Floor.” Those two songs were written around At Weddings-era, but they weren’t finished. They changed from when they were originally written.
Aside from that I would say the whole vibe of the EP and the intention of the EP and the other songs came from actually having a little bit more community and not being as isolated. I had moved to Louisville in January of 2017 and so as I started touring in 2018 and playing shows in general for the first time it just opened a whole new world of community.
[Projections] definitely didn’t come from the same mode of literal isolation. I was very much exploring my own world and trying to build it. A lot of trying to balance out the new community that I had or was finding [with] a lot of reflection and not a whole lot of engagement, but it was still—compared to what I had before—a lot of engagement.
Where did you find that community?
I started meeting other artists. I knew people on the internet a little bit which isn’t really the same as knowing people, but started to form friendships. I had my own place in Louisville and I was able to host different bands. I met a few different bands just by Saddle Creek knowing that I lived in Louisville. They would hit me up and be like “Hey, this band or these people we know are looking for a place to stay in between routes on tour.” That would happen through them and through friends of friends. So I met people that way, I met people as I started playing shows and sharing my work and listening to other peoples’ work and connecting through that and forming friendships.
It wasn’t like I had found a Louisville scene or anything—it was still hard there and I was working full-time until January of 2019. So it was still scattered but I was getting more of a grasp on how [relationships] could be reciprocal and nourishing even from far away.
How did you get connected to Sam and Alex?
I did a weeklong tour with Alex G in May of last year. That was super cool because I’ve loved Alex’s music since bandcamp days, pre-Domino, around Orchid Tapes putting out DSU. I had been a big fan and I drove my little sister and I to see him in St. Louis when I was 18 or 19.
I ended up hitting it off with them on that tour and we were like “Ugh, this is only a weeklong tour!” At the end Alex was like, “This was so fun, I wish you could do the fall tour,” and I was like, “I can do that fall tour!” So a few weeks later I got the offer for that. And then we did the monthlong North American tour in October and November of last year. That’s how we got connected, just being on the road. It’s really relieving when you find people that you connect with and get along with and it’s mutually nourishing.
I was playing solo on that tour just out of not having time to find a consistent band—I’m interested in that, but that hasn’t happened for me yet. I started playing some of the new songs backstage when we were hanging out and Sam and Alex would be around and listen and say that they were into it. Sam would jam with me in particular, and I was like “Well if you want to play during the set you’re welcome to.” He was down, so he started playing during my set with me and it was really fun.
I had talked to them about having this idea for an EP, and I thought that I was going to have a different producer for each track just to dip my toes into the idea of working with people because my experience has been so isolated that it’s a little bit daunting to invite other people into it. At the end of the tour Alex was like, “Send me those songs,” so I did. Then he called me and was like, “This is sick. Let’s do it.”
Your new single, “Hours,” opens with the lines “Did I run into your arms / A flower or fire? / Was it crushing your heart too / Or just desire.” When did you write this song, and what are those opening lines about?
That song was written in January or February of 2019. It came together all in one sitting, and I was just like, “Oh, this is a song.” One of those. Songwriting in general is just a state of reflection for me, of processing the external and giving it time to be internal but then putting it into something. That can be really tedious emotional work, obviously, so sometimes it’s hard to step into that.
The song is definitely reflecting on time spent with someone, but also reflecting on what that could mean to the other person. I’m reflecting on what I mean to someone else. I think language is an interesting thing, especially English. We have so few words to actually describe feeling. We can describe things. My friend was saying we can describe things in a way to sell them, but we can’t describe things about feeling. “Did I run into your arms?” Like, did it come across this way to you? Delicate, intentional time spent together? Or did it just seem like this ball of fire rushing towards you that couldn’t really escape?
In another interview you said, of Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, “that album wrecked me. You find things that make sense for you and that affirm your experience. It helps you figure out good questions to ask and good things to be upset about.” Are there any artists or albums that have had a similar effect on you recently?
I’m a real big full-album listener, that’s how I try to spend time with records. I get excited when I know that someone that I like is releasing music, but I’m also hesitant to listen to singles because I like to sit with albums.
I would say one song that has done that for me in a weird way is the Pavement song “Major Leagues.” I’d never really listened to Pavement until this year. I tried listening to a record that someone recommended and it was Brighten the Corners, but I never really got into it. I think I was in an airport—it wasn’t really a great vibe for listening to Pavement for the first time.
Anyway, I heard this song on the radio and I was like, “This is so good.” It’s just talking about relationships. It makes you laugh but it also makes you want to cry. It’s just line after line like a wrecking ball. “You kiss like a rock / but you know I need it anyway.” It was a song that truly I just kept replaying after it would end, all day on a loop. I didn’t listen to anything else. So I feel like it’s not fair to not bring that up even though that’s not a record. It did really fuck me up.
And then I’ve just been listening to a lot of old things that are new to me. I’ve been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell. I got compared to her a lot and that’s when I started listening to her. No one I knew growing up listened to her, and then I was like ‘Well, that’s really kind of people to say that I’m anything like this person.” Blue has been on heavy rotation this summer. And the new Fiona Apple record—I had a really visceral reaction to that as well. And the new Katie Day record has also done the same thing for me.
I like music that I can attach my own experiences to, but I also love music that gives me another line of vision for something that I think I’m already familiar with, or maybe I think I know what they’re saying already or what the thing is, but then they’re like “Oh, actually you don’t. Shut up for a second.” I really gravitate toward that kind of stuff.
I wanted to ask about the EP cover, which shows you semi-hidden behind a tree. What does that image mean? How did it come about?
I knew that I needed album artwork, and I had made the album artwork for At Weddings. It’s a picture of my sister and I running up a hill in front of my parents’ house, and then I pressed all the flowers around it on a walk. I was actually at that same park in Louisville called Cherokee Park. It’s a park that I grew up going to as well. I was just on a walk with a friend and we were thinking that we were out there trying to take press photos, ‘cause the label told me I needed some new ones. I was up in this tree, as one does, and he just happened to take the picture. It’s an iPhone picture. It was actually a mistake picture, and then we looked at it and I was like, “Obviously they’re not gonna let me use this for press ‘cause my face is hidden, but maybe this is the album artwork?”
I wanted it to be an homage to At Weddings, because on the At Weddings cover you can’t even really tell that it’s me. I’m completely indistinguishable, I’m turned toward the camera, and there’s movement. I liked the idea of it being a little bit more visible, but I’m still a little bit hidden, not ready to fully be present. On the back of the picture disc we’re releasing, I am fully visible. I was like, “The picture disc people get to see me.” I’m getting a little bit more comfortable figuring out how to share myself and my inner world with the public.
Projections is out October 16 via Saddle Creek. You can pre-order it here.
