Carrying is North Carolina native Sally Anne Morgan’s third solo album for Thrill Jockey after 2020’s Thread and 2021’s more experimental instrumental album Cups (she also released two duo albums for the label as House and Land with Sarah Louise). Musically, this one sits somewhere between her two previous solo releases, with the opening banjo instrumental, Beekeeper, adopting the pretty but slightly offset oddness of Cups and the following song, The Center, using the more traditional band set-up found on Thread.
Her band features drummer Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn Band, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers), guitarist Andrew Zinn, bassist/engineer Joe Dejarnette and guitarist Ripley Johnson (Rose City Band, Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo), who contributes to Morgan’s arrangement of Jack Elliott’s frontier ballad Diamond Joe, her latest album single.
The overriding theme of the album brings life, birth and motherhood to Sally Anne’s rural style of music, and it is present in the lyrics from the first verse of The Center: ‘Universal tomb, Universal womb / Becoming other, again a child, again a mother‘. It feels like a natural progression for Sally Anne’s music, which has always felt organic – even Andrew Zinn’s electric guitar on the long form Dawn Circle feels essential – and earthy.
Zinn’s electric is more prominent on the eerier Awake, a reverb and tremolo-led piece of wicca strangeness, where bass and drums rattle and thud amidst the echoes, and Sally Anne sings of foraging and awake dreaming: ‘I eat nothing but the wild wild berries […] When I sleep it’s in a bed of soft mosses / Am I the dreamer or the dream?‘
Summerwater feels all the more woody than the electric guitar-led tracks; more similar to Beekeeper in instrumentation, although akin to Awake in dreamy lyrical character: ‘Drink the coffee for the cream, and write it all down / A gift from a dream, from the deepest waters, a lesson to keep our waters clean.’
This awareness of the environment and the earth permeates Carrying. Still, the final track, Song for Arthur, is more of a declaration of love and protection for the newborn child, which is the overriding theme of this album. An acoustic piece (immediately lending a more innocent edge to the music), the tune comes in like a soothing lullaby, with sweeps of fiddle blending with a relaxed picked guitar line. Ending a set full of music that veers from uneasy, with reverb and pulsing electric guitars, to spare and organic, the gorgeous, imperfect bowed notes that accompany Sally Anne’s unambiguous lines of adoration in the second half of the song are somehow reassuring. In a world full of perils, both natural and unnatural, love can surely overcome all.
So much of what we accumulate and carry around with us burdens us, but we also can’t or don’t know how to let go.
Sally Anne Morgan
Pre-order Sally Anne Morgan’s Carrying (out on 22nd Sept – Newt Red Vinyl | CD | Digital):
https://thrilljockey.com/products/carrying