Photo: Adrianne Lenker

Indigo Sparke shares her shadowy meditation on mortality in “Everything Everything”, announces signing to Sacred Bones

Way back in October, Indigo Sparke shared “Baby” and revealed plans for her Adrianne Lenker-produced debut album Echo, which is coming out on February 19 – and she today reveals that it’ll be coming out through NYC’s finest Sacred Bones. Along with the news, she has shared a new track called “Everything Everything”, which finds her perfectly slotting into the label’s roster of talent. On the new song, she reveals:

“I wrote this song not long after coming back from a magical castle in Italy where a group of us had been making music and soaking in the golden honey days. I met a beautiful human Shahzad Ismaily who had discovered I also write poetry… He invited me back to NYC and I was living in his empty spare room in Brooklyn briefly. I borrowed this little parlour guitar of his and completely fell in love. I just sat in that room for hours and days playing around and just laying next to the guitar looking at the ceiling thinking about life and death and the poetry of it all. How life and death will hold us up to light. How grief ripens inside us all and we all decay and everything changes and flies away. I remember feeling this liberating sense of freedom and melancholic nostalgia. It was so hot and the wind almost blew through from a different dimension or plane. I guess the song came through from that place too. It just came out. I can almost still feel that time on my skin, or in my breath.”

That image of Sparke lying back and quietly singing out the various unfiltered thoughts in her mind is the perfect way to enter the contemplative gem that is “Everything Everything”. Guitar and voice form the skeletal core, while very hushed tones dotted around suggest a wide atmosphere, into which Sparke quietly projects her amorphous thoughts. Her songwriting is all-encompassing, seeing her face off with the blackness as she sings “one tip closer and I might fall / into the universe’s big black void,” and yet the actual amount of words in the song is extremely limited. It’s her impressionistic use of melody and subtle sound layering that fleshes out the picture in your imagination, so that when she simply repeats “everything, everything, everything, everything is dying,” you see it all – though not simply as a finality, but as a whole cycle of death and rebirth.

Indigo Sparke’s debut album Echo will be released on February 19 through Sacred Bones. You can also find her on Bandcamp, Facebook and Instagram.