Rachel Sermanni released her third album, So It Turns last week, it follows on from her 2015 LP Tied To The Moon.
Where Tied To The Moon saw the Scottish songwriter add rockier, to her otherworldly sound, So It Turns sees Rachel take that even further and journey into more expansive and eclectic waters. Highlights include the haunting spectral, gothic-hued textures of recent single ‘What Can I Do’ , the sassy, subtly jazz flecked rock of ‘Typical Homegirl’ and the more experimental ‘Tiger‘. The album also comes alongside a 13-date (with more TBA) UK/Ireland tour that’ll include a stop at London’s St Pancras Church, following a recent performance with London Contemporary Voices alongside Daughter‘s Elena Tonra and others at the Southbank Centre.
Here Rachel Sermanni takes us behind each of the songs on So It Turns:
Put Me In The River
Volunteering in a cafe at a Buddhist Monastery in the Borders of Scotland. Trying to be patient over a broken coffee machine at the close of day. Meditative methods don’t seem to be working and so I go, instead, sit in the nearby river. It is March. It feels good. This song orbits that event and other more internal tensions occurring for me at the time. Basically feeling crazy and unable to suppress/control a feeling of Desire, which is really a main theme of the whole album.
See You
This documents the process of coming to know and wanting to see someone who lives on the other side of the world. From first meet. To online conversations. To anticipation of meeting again. Suffice to say the romantic relationship didn’t last long but it wrote a few good songs and allowed me another good experience of the theme: desire, what to do with it and how to be with it.
If I
Also written at Samye Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery. It’s about the questions that arose for me whilst I stayed there, contemplating nun-hood. Part jest, part serious. It sort of shows the tear for me between living a life that involved ‘conventional’ things like fulfilling biological and societal expectations vis Not. Which of these choices would lead to being a being of greatest benefit? Which would teach me more? Now, looking back, both have their challenges but family life is HARD and it is definitely a really fundamental aspect, now, of my life and inner-world-development.
Wish I Showed My Love
Travels through three events, three vignettes: First, as a young teenager, holding someone I love, unaware it is for the last time. He was my cousin. Second, as a grown person, trying to express that I care for the person I care for, and finding it hard. My boyfriend, at the time; I wanted to express my love to him and yet I was paralysed trying to say it. I was also weeping and unsure he understood the gravity of what I was saying. Saying ‘I Love You’ is a bit like, I feel, being close to death. You’re inviting impermanence in when you say it because you’re in understanding that it might be, for whatever reason, the only chance you have to say it. Third is a moment running through the forests near Cambridge; see a tree being ripped up from the earth by a ‘man in a machine’. Breaks my heart. Wish I’d shown some appreciation.
It was recorded when all the rest of the band were having a break. Was shaking and crying a little. Feels a very vulnerable and important song for me. A message, especially, to the person in the first ‘frame’ of the song, who has inspired previous songs on previous albums (Eggshells & Marshmallow Unicorn).
What Can I Do
I was lying on the floor after a full on yoga session just after Trump has been voted president staring despairing at the ceiling. There was much on the news about refugees and the dearth of an embrace we offer them. And there was the looming vote on Brexit too so I was hoping Britain would make a better decision (in my eyes) in the upcoming. I felt drawn to the mandolin and wrote, in a short sitting, What Can I Do. Though it was 3 years ago, this song is fitting to the motions of now and perhaps more useful and relevant than before.
Typical Homegirl
I had just come home from a long tour. Was looking at one of the many Naked Ladies that I enjoy to draw. She is staring and sad and in a very open position. I decided to try write from her perspective and what came was so brilliant. I was possessed by her and learnt that she was my sorrow and she wanted me to acknowledge her by acknowledging my feelings for the home situation at the time – which wasn’t so good. My Naked Ladies are often very sassy which isn’t a side of myself that often gets vented so this was great fun to write and record. I also realised, through this exercise of channelling her, that these Naked Ladies are definitely fundamental aspects of myself that deserve being recognised as such and treated with reverence. I love them.
Come To You
This is another from the Monastery time. It’s my song to the wise man who is the abbott there and is a more solemn perspective regarding the notions in ‘If I’. It orbits the memories of visiting him to ask him questions about my life and ‘practice’ in his little Interview room. And, near to the end of the song, it zooms out and looks at the ever present subject of wrestling with my sense of Desire and what to do with it. Where to go with it. Into the world? Or into the monastery?
Namesake
Written along with a collection of songs from Tied To The moon. I think that it was the musicians on this album that made this song possible. We created all the right components for it to come alive. Feels very expansive and oceanic to me. This is a song reflecting on a romantic relationship that had ended.
Tiger
Was also written at the monastery. I went through a phase, during the daily meditations, where I thought it’d be useful to envisage my internal desires as an external force – a Tiger seemed fitting. So, as I sat there, if something arose that had any relation to a desire for the future or hankering for the past, this Tiger would start lolling about the temple, sometimes it would lie beside me with its heavy tongue hanging out, sometimes it would be humping a pillar or smashing a relic… I later described this technique to one of the nuns and she just told me to focus on the breath.
So It Turns
Is the sad sequel to ‘See You’. And a lovely piano solo to go out with, the pianist is Declan Forde.
UPCOMING TOUR-DATES
11th Sep – Aberdeen, The Blue Lamp
12th Sep – Inverness, Eden Court
13th Sep – Stirling, The Tollbooth
19th – 22nd Sep – Shetland (Songwriting Festival)
27th Sep – Galway, The Black Gate
28th Sep – Dublin, Lost Lane
2nd Oct – Album Launch – Glasgow, St Andrews in the Square
10th Oct – London, St Pancras Church
11th Oct – Husthwaite Village Hall
12th Oct – Bury, The Met
13th Oct – Kingskerswell Parish Church
19th Oct – Durham, The Old Launderette
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