Secret Sisters – Saturn Return
New West – 28 February 2019
The latest album from Secret Sisters is named for the astrological occurrence that takes place approximately every 29 ½ years when Saturn returns to the same place in the stars as at the moment of a person’s birth and when a woman experiences an awakening about who she is as a person. This, their fourth album, marks something of sea change for Alabama sisters Laura and Lydia Rogers in that, encouraged by returning co-producer Brandi Carlile (who also contributes guitar, piano and vocals), it marks the first time they’ve sung individually rather than featuring their harmonies, although the credits don’t indicate who sings what lead, as well as writing the songs without collaborators. It’s also an album marked by significant changes in their lives, with the loss of both their grandmothers and the births of their first children, inevitably prompting songs reflecting on mortality and relationships.
It is, however, their twin voices that get things underway with the unaccompanied intro to Silver in which the first four lines mention both mothers and babies, developing into a swampy tempo-shifting number in celebration of the former, the silver in their hair “a crown the holiest may wear”.
The sense of them transitioning to more mature women underpins the airily soulful, piano-accompanied Late Bloomer which, penned by Lydia, declares “It doesn’t matter when you bloom/It matters that you do” before they turn to the damage of dysfunctional relationships in the spooked harmonies of Cabin, sung from the perspective of a woman who’s been assaulted (“He was cruel and callous/I suffered at his hand/I’m left where he put me/The cage in which I stand”) and written during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
Things get lighter, lyrically and musically with Hand Over My Heart, the chugging guitar riff and muted drum beat bed-rocking treated keyboard waterfalls and a lyric about learning to trust and love again after being bruised in a previous relationship, written by Laura on the day she learnt she was pregnant.
Fair is the album’s most straightforward arrangement with just fingerpicked acoustic guitar and twin harmonies, placing the focus on lyrics’ memories of a friend’s abusive childhood (“I wish I could forget/The way that trailer smelled of burned-out cigarettes/Or her daddy and his temper/And how her spirit seemed to fade”) and how the narrator “never knew home could be anything but fine” while, now grown and grown apart, her old friend’s now “a mother who’s fighting to stay clean”.
Marking the midway point, Tin Can Angel is a particular standout, a strummed, piano-coloured slow country soul wearied waltz call for support and solace before things get reflective again with the crooningly sung Nowhere, Baby with its sense of always being on the move and getting nowhere, the life of the travelling musician informing how “I will keep my suitcase packed/I’m just weary of the workin’/Trading songs for fickle love”, but recognising that sometimes you need to walk away and find who you truly are, suggesting, perhaps, there were times when they might have considered whether the work-life balance needed to be redistributed.
There’s a hymnal feel to Hold You Dear; another simply spun highlight with just voices and piano before the strings sweep in, a song of a child to a parent, of a mother to a child, of a lover to a lover and an affirmation of the anchor of those things that make a home regardless of time’s passing and the losses it brings.
Carlile lends the full force of her vocals to the penultimate number, Water Witch, an ethereal yet quietly muscular slow sway siren song that, the river serving as the feminine principle, metaphorically speaks of female emancipation and rescue from the raging ocean, of gathering up “the lonely, the lost, and the gone” and bringing them into the current, “seeking the magic below” in “the place only mad women know”.
Sounding Sandy Denny notes, it ends with Laura taking lead and the sisters voices soaring together on the heartstoppingly moving Healer In The Sky, a slow march rhythm with strummed guitar and strings, an acceptance of mortality (“I’ll take my chances on the cancer/I lived my life and I’ve found the answer”) that, written by Lydia’s, poignantly seems to be sung in their grandmother’s voice but rings with a universality of a life well lived and facing an ending with a faith that “when my candle burns out you will be alright”.
The sisters say the journey to making this album has been a transformative experience, deaths and births marking a coming of age as both women and as artists. In Roman mythology, the reign of Saturn was regarded as a Golden Age; With Saturn’s Return, the Secret Sisters have entered theirs.
Pre-Order Saturn Return via Norman Records
Secret Sisters UK Tour Dates
June 10—Bury St. Edmunds, The Apex
June 11—Bury, The Met
June 13—Gateshead, Sage Gateshead
June 14—Sheffield, Firth Hall
June 16—Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
June 17—Milton Keynes, The Stables
June 18—London, Union Chapel
June 19—Bristol, St. George’s
June 21—Tunbridge Wells, Black Deer Festival
The Secret Sisters feature in Folk Radio’s Lost in Transmission Episode 53 alongside the likes of Ned Roberts, Bronwynne Brent, Citizen Bravo (ft. Karine Polwart), Tami Neilson, Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band, Matt McGinn, The Bonny Men, Troda, Alden Patterson and Dashwood, Bonny Light Horseman, Sam Lee and lots more. You can listen here.