“In The Reading,” from Kierstin Sieser’s new album Shark Tooth Moon, starts with a splash of electric guitar, a swinging acoustic guitar behind it. A sound a little bit like a small gong finishes the melody the electric guitar began. “Made a wish on a wishing card / the only one she said / turn myself into a kite / to get pulled in your wind,” Sieser begins singing. With a simple chord change, the mood shifts; the lyrics shade a little darker, but the music gets brighter. “But I know I’m going down / and I don’t know how to stop it,” Sieser sings. The way she sings the line, you’re not at all sure she wants to know, either.
Shark Tooth Moon is Sieser’s latest release since 2018’s Sometimes You’re Right, which she recorded with Tiny Ocean, the band she fronts and writes the songs for. Like the material with Tiny Ocean the songs on Shark Tooth Moon are redolent with delicious atmosphere and punctuated by sharp lyrics. But they depart from Tiny Ocean’s material in a few ways as well.
“I had a pretty specific vision,” Sieser said of writing the songs, which she did last fall. “I knew I wanted it to be minimal. They weren’t band songs.”
The songs also departed in subject matter. “The songs that I did with Tiny Ocean — I love those songs, but it was a darker place for me,” Sieser said. For Shark Tooth Moon, “I wanted them all to be love songs in some way or another, almost devotional. So I had got together with my friend who has a studio” — that would be Mike Liquori, who co-produced and engineered Tiny Ocean’s 2018 release Sometimes You’re Right — “and I told him, ‘I have these songs and I want them to be really stripped down. I want it to be weird and magical.’… I wanted to go back to the way that I remember writing when I first started writing, to immerse myself in a secret world … like the kind of creation you do when you’re a kid.” Her goal in writing the songs on Shark Tooth Moon was “to be surreal and to not judge myself for the places I was going. I wanted to create this weird fairy tale.”
In returning to her first instincts, though, Sieser found that her approach to writing songs, and particularly love songs, had changed. “As a younger person, I had a really cliché understanding of what a love song was, and that’s why I didn’t want to write one,” she said. “And then I feel like something happened, and I realized there’s a complexity in that, too.” There could be depth in expressing happiness, which happened to coincide with another goal Sieser had for the project.
“I decided very consciously that I wanted to put something helpful into the world. These songs are very much about feeling seen, or understood,” Sieser said. “Not to get too spiritual about it, but there is a power in what you sing, and the art that you create. And it’s not that you shouldn’t explore the messy and dark places, but I just started becoming aware of how songs are prayers and spells when you sing them enough.”
Sieser was seeking grounding for personal reasons, too. “Personally, I’m going through a divorce,” she said. In the fall, “my whole world blew up.” She found an anchor in music, and in going to the studio with Liquori. “I’m very grateful for him,” she said. Almost all the songs were written in the fall. Recording took place from December through February. Sieser had always planned on releasing Shark Tooth Moon this spring; even with the Covid-19 outbreak, there was no particular need to change that plan, though much else has.
Cover for Shark Tooth Moon.
“We had a bunch of Tiny Ocean shows that got cancelled along with everybody else, but what are you going to do?” Sieser said. “I’m very lucky. I work for the Red Cross, so we’re obviously in the disaster world. I’m a fundraiser and primarily work from home anyway, so my work life hasn’t changed much.” Her 13-year-old son is now at home, going to school online. She noted that many of her friends, “whether they work primarily as artists or are simply not working,” have lost income.
“I feel for them,” she said. “I think this has made us aware, if we didn’t already know, of how on a wire our lives were.”
For now, her plans are to keep working, and keep writing new music. During the fall, she said, writing music “was the only thing keeping me grounded. Now that the world is turned upside down for everyone in a much more profound way, I’ve set up a studio in my house and am recording more songs. Might as well.” She may well end up with another full-length album, “a Part B to this one…. Depending on how stripped down, and what I decide to do, I could finish these next songs in a month or two.”
“I’ve been writing my whole life, but haven’t put my work in the world enough,” Sieser continued. “Even if five people listen to it, we should always be putting art in the world. It’s kind of our responsibility…. People need the connection, the human connection of what art can do.”
Sieser is also planning on donating all the money she makes from Shark Tooth Moon to the New Haven Creative Sector Relief Fund, administered by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.
“When you’re in any sort of crisis, you go to your default mode of coping,” Sieser said. Making music “is how I understand things. It’s my escape. It’s an anchor. Especially in the music world, everybody is doing that.”
“I think even through all the songs, I’m always trying to connect with some sort of greater, divine thing,” she continued. “Every song ever written is about God in some way. I was really trying to embrace that. Whether you’re writing a love song or a song that is completely from a subconscious place, they’re still devotional somehow. It’s just such a mystery, and I want to be completely connected to the mystery.”
Find Kierstin Sieser’s Shark Tooth Moon on Bandcamp.
