Search - Sonya Kitchell :: We Come Apart

It s said that every cell in our bodies regenerates over the course of seven years, making us different people, literally, than we were before. It s a different Sonya Kitchell who returns after seven years with We Come Apart, her first full-length album since 2008. The 12-track collection is due Jan. 22 on Rockwood Music Hall Recordings/Thirty Tigers.

The time frame is fitting: the cycle of renewal is a theme running through We Come Apart. We all come apart at some point, and we also come back together, Kitchell says. I ve always felt the fleeting nature of things. Perhaps I was born with an awareness of impermanence, and maybe this album is about those most basic processes in life.

We Come Apart caps a period of growth and reinvention for Kitchell, who was 17 when she released her first album This Storm in 2006. Since then, she moved from her hometown in the hills of western Massachusetts to New York City, spent time in parts of Europe and Asia, worked as a side musician and a songwriter-for-hire, released the Convict of Conviction EP of string quartets in 2010, learned the technical side of recording music and taught herself photography. She also recorded We Come Apart two different times, once with money she raised through a PledgeMusic campaign and the second time with funds she scraped together herself.

I did a first draft of the record, and it wasn t right, so I went back to the drawing board, she says. The really important thing that I thought that I had missed was that all the subtlety had been slashed out of the songs, and I wanted there to be a vulnerability and sense of space in the songs, and there wasn t.

Now there is. You can hear it in the drowsy sensuality of Mexico, where Kitchell sings in alluring tones over a classic-pop blend of piano, little sunbursts of guitar and a restless bassline that moves things along. Album opener Follow Me In has a folkier feel, with chiming guitars and ukulele chasing Kitchell s voice into its breathy upper register; while This Feeling rides a stomping beat through walls of corrugated guitar as Kitchell sings with pulsating intensity. The album completes a cycle of its own by ending with the title track, an aching piano ballad that subtly underscores the theme of renewal.

She recorded the bones of We Come Apart in a farmhouse in western Massachusetts, not far from where she grew up, working by herself and with multi-instrumentalist Shazad Ismaily. Kitchell took the rough tracks back to New York, where she recruited friends to help her flesh out arrangements that include percussion, horns and strings. The result is an album that feels true to her, a concept that Herbie Hancock had emphasized when she worked with the legendary jazz pianist.
He told me, If you make something you like and it does well, great, you re doing your thing. If you make something that you hate and it does well, then you re living this lie, Kitchell says. I really learned from my time with him, and in general, that it has to be true, and it took me a while to figure out what was true for me. It took learning to do things for myself because I didn t have a lot of financial resources, so I had to.
In addition to Hancock, Kitchell spent time playing and touring with bassist Tal Wilkenfeld (Jeff Beck, Jackson Browne) and the Brooklyn shoegaze band Blue Foundation. Kitchell teamed with the bassist and composer Garth Stevenson on Convict of Conviction, and also studied writers who inspire her, from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, deconstructing their work to peek at the innards. When she was home, she was in New York, which can be a hard, if rewarding, place to live.