Sally Anne Morgan announces her new album, Second Circle The Horizon, and shares the first album single “I Saw a Heron”.
In 2023, Sally Anne Morgan released Carrying, her third solo album for Thrill Jockey, exploring life, birth and motherhood. Her love of, and connection to, nature permeates all her music. As her bio reveals, she was raised on old time and Appalachian folk traditions, and her artistry embodies the rich life of the communities and natural world she surrounds herself with. Based in Alexander, NC, in the thick of Appalachia and the edge of the Pisgah National Forest, Morgan’s blend of traditional technique and distinctly modern compositional approach are infused with the sounds of her garden, surrounding pastures, forests and mountains.
It’s easy to become totally absorbed in the rustic simplicity of Morgan’s music, which, as Glenn Kimpton said of 2020’s Thread, also sounds completely original within the parameters of its musical roots. With her more experimental instrumental album Cups (2021), he described it as highly creative, rich and detailed; a stunner – as music that challenges and wonderfully brings to mind the magic and intricacies of nature and rural life.
For her fourth album, Second Circle The Horizon, out June 20th, 2025, via Thrill Jockey, she is joined by guest synthesist Sean Dunlap (Field Patterns) and hurdy-gurdy player Brian “Geologist” Weitz (Animal Collective), as well as longtime collaborator/mixer Joseph Dejarnette.
Alongside the album announcement, Morgan has also shared her first single, I saw a Heron.
On the album & piece, Morgan notes:
“I wanted to capture the feeling of walking outside and encountering organic nature sounds, some with patterns, some with a randomness that also verges on its own kind of pattern. I have played so many fiddle tunes, the fiddle tune, the structure, the melody, are at the root of all music I make, whether I want them to be or not. Old time fiddle music is the seed that grew into the part of my brain that makes music, and everything I do somehow seems to come back to that. I think something gets lost when you’re too focused on honing and refining everything. Someone who is not focused on virtuosic playing, but more rustic simplicity and spaciousness, there is life and energy to it, electricity.”
The album title is taken from the line “The Eye is the First Circle, the horizon is the second”, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles, in which our lives are seen as “a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.“
The album notes share: This looking out beyond oneself and the cyclical nature of life’s patterns became central focuses of Morgan’s outlook and craft. The album notes expand on this: In her own experience, circling back to her second pregnancy and to the ideas that started Cups (2021), coincided with her desire to meditate on circularity, to take in, create, and unleash something new imprinted with her voice as part of the chorus around her. The pieces themselves are true evocations of environmental atmosphere, replete with fleeting moments of joy, the buzzing din and repetitions of daily life, and spells of quiet solace.
Pre-Order Second Circle The Horizon: https://thrilljockey.com/products/second-circle-the-horizon