(2020) Hayley Sabella - Flew the Nest


Review:
Born in Massachusetts,  raised in Nicaragua, indie-folk singer songwriter Hayley Sabella brings together widescreen arrangements and intimate vocals for an album that explores transformation and taking ownership of your experiences. It opens with the decidedly mistitled Ordinary, the opening drone unfolding into a swellingly majestic open sky sonic panorama. It is one of several songs that address the sense of a coming change in a relationship (“I feel the seasons changing soon/My lungs, they ache for a different air…Good things come from sewing seed/But you can’t remember each one’s name/You just feel its weight as it drops away”). A chiming rhythm sets the stall for the self-love themed It Was There, a musing on becoming involved in relationships against your better instincts and how changing for the benefit of others can have the opposite of the intended effect (“I made a room for you in my house/But then I lost a place to be myself/And when you were leaving, you said I’d become someone else”), a reminder not to give up who you are to be what someone wants you to be and of the strength found in reclaiming a sense of self (“what in the world is stronger/Than a woman who has built herself back up”). The title track, inspired by watching a family of barn swallows overcome the disaster of their nest being destroyed as the hatchlings learnt to fly and fend for themselves, serving as a metaphor for striking out to become your own person even if that means leaving a sense of security behind, haunting fiddle layered over the circling keyboards drone as she sings how she “may have healed around the scar of time”. Again confessionally sung against an expansive arrangement, the slow walking beat July Rain keens to a sense of catharsis, a hymnal call for the storm that will “Break the heat” and bring “sweet relief”, be that in the sense of an oppressive summer or a relationship needing release. Cape Cod is a revisiting from her previous album,  Forgive the Birds, there a sparse, acoustic number, but now given a fuller band arrangement. Keening pedal steel, percussive swells and guitar chimes bolster a memory of leaving home and embarking on a  voyage of self-discovery (“I turned around at seventeen/Learned to drive, I went the other way/Said ‘anywhere, but east from here is where I wanna be’”) self-righteously armed “with a backpack full of principles/And how things ought to be/All figured out and folded neat/Like my mother’s laundered sheets”.  But also reflecting on the unwelcome changes along the way as she muses “Kindness used to come so easy/How’d I learn to be so mean?/Not to your face, but in my head/I tossed you out like some book I read/With which I disagreed”. Sorrow:Joy is a simply constructed, fingerpicked number, the title succinctly encapsulating the sense of being overwhelmed by the weight of mixed emotions (“Joy feels a lot like sadness/Just a cup that’s overflowing/Impartial to what it’s holding”) as charted in the lyrics (“You found me in the driveway/Lights off, the engine humming/Got home an hour ago/Paralyzed by things unspoken”). The album ends on two songs that draw on weather imagery, firstly the circling guitar patterns of Imaginary Sunshine with its examination of the cost of faith as a cocoon (“Now I count the cost/Of what I might have lost/By sheltering myself/From feeling the storm”) and, finally, the rhythmically quietly pulsing Windy with its use of pathetic fallacy (“it was windy the day that you left me”) and the need to let go and to feel emotion without judgement (“No need to feel sorry/It’s okay to feel angry/No need to love what is free”) as the experience “shakes the dust from wings”) and, though exposed to the emotional elements, use them to “build me a new home”. Suffused with a sense of calm and tranquillity despite the sometimes turbulent nature of the feelings it charts, listening is a little like the musical equivalent of relaxing in mountain spa, warmed by the waters and invigorated by the air.





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk, pop
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits