There’s a confidence that rings out across the eleven songs that make up Waiting for the Sky to Speak, Joanna Schubert’s debut album as Oropendola, a word that means “golden pendulum.” Set to release March 17th, 2023, these tracks shimmer with bursts of energy and emotion, swinging from playfulness to earnestness with deft, technicolor brushstrokes. The album is a celebration of choosing life even in the face of its ephemerality, and of finding motion even in the midst of stillness. Today, we release the first single, Knocking Down Flowers, along with a beautifully hazy & shimmering video to accompany it. Joanna says of the track and its inspiration:
In January 2020, I started recording myself improvising every morning – “morning pages” inspired by The Artist’s Way, a creative self-help book. I recorded morning pages #1 soon after a pivotal, complicated, on-and-off relationship “reached its end. Round and round we went, addicted to one another, unable to break free of a sticky cycle that prevented us from fully blooming together. That song seed turned into Knocking Down Flowers within a few days.
There was a construction site near my old apartment in South Slope, Brooklyn that the two of us would often pass by. We developed a bit – bittersweet in retrospect – that it was our home. We would peer through the diamond-shaped opening at the stunted barren landscape beyond and imagine the possibilities. Dirt, trash, patches of weeds, colorful graffiti on the green walls, the droning hum of the Prospect Expressway: our weird little insular paradise. One evening, the site’s door was slightly ajar. We made it inside of our home, for the first and only time, photographing one another, running around and dancing with abandon, beers in hands reaching towards the sky.
There is a certain type of pleasure, and comfort, gleaned from inhabiting liminal space. Suspended in midair, everything takes on a bit of a hazy, yet tantalizing, glow. You are just of this moment, no obligation to the past or future. Not quite here, not quite there, you don’t have to choose. If you don’t have to choose, you don’t have to make the wrong choice. If you knock down the flowers before they bloom, you don’t have to watch them wilt.
The songs on Waiting for the Sky to Speak were born from a time of immobility both existential and literal. As the world went into a state of lockdown during the pandemic, Schubert was reckoning with a feeling that, for years, her life had been at a standstill. She was ready to move forward, to embrace joy and sing through the static. The album title, which comes from the album’s opening track “Rorschach Sky,” is a fitting one then: the phrase points to the missed opportunity of spending your life waiting for something when life is happening all around you.
Across this collection, Schubert’s, who has played in bands like Half Waif, Barrie & Samir Langus, skills with orchestration and arrangement, which she studied in college, is on full display. The album’s sonic palette blends the orchestral sounds of clarinet, flugelhorn, harp, and strings with searing synths, grooving drums and bass, adventurous vocal manipulations, and emotive piano—a kind of kaleidoscopic chamber pop that pays homage to both the grandiose theatricality of Kate Bush and the digital balladry of FKA Twigs.
The production is bolstered by co-producer Zubin Hensler, who also served as mixer. Despite having never met before working together, the two podded up during the height of the pandemic at Hensler’s studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The liminal space created by a world on pause led the two to develop an album that sounds limitless.
On lead single “Knocking Down Flowers,” Schubert finds life in the least likely of places: a construction site. Here, she recognizes and illuminates the power of living at the intersection of contrasts. The album’s emotional core comes through on roiling ballad “Trust the Sun” and clear-eyed album closer “When You Carried Me,” which both look to the sun—another kind of golden pendulum—as a guiding force. While much of the rest of Waiting for the Sky to Speak careens across black-ice patches of inner conflict, both these songs offer a tentative hand outward, towards love, friendship, and family— the fixed sun in a changeable sky—as she coaxes herself back out into the world.
Waiting for the Sky to Speak is an imaginative and colorful chimera of a collection that marks Oropendola’s triumphant arrival. Ultimately, these songs ask one of the soul’s most fundamental questions: how do you find your footing in an impermanent world? There is no absolute answer, and thus, as Schubert finds, there is no purpose in waiting for one. How liberating it is to break out of our own cycles, to be the force that knocks the pendulum off its axis.
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