It’s no longer an aberration for artists to collaborate in the cloud, given the ease with which most of the world accesses high-speed internet. And A Sunny Day In Glasgow—collectively based in Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Sydney, Australia—creates the sort of impressionistic guitar pop that feels ripe for working in the ether. But that doesn’t mean the process of writing fine new album Sea When Absent (Lefse) across three cities and two hemispheres was ideal. In fact, the method was so present that it became a centerpiece of its narrative. The band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on the band.
Annie Fredrickson: If I thought about it at all, which I don’t think I did, I used to think that having an herbalist—and the phrase “I have an herbalist”—was only for far parodies of the elite like Gwyneth Paltrow. But that was before a constellation of ultrasounds and specialists left me at a little at odds with conventional medical care. Thanks to some prescience in selecting an insurance policy based on its coverage of yoga classes, however, I discovered that naturopathic consultations were also fair game and trundled off to the world of alternative therapy. After an hour-long appointment, which is longer than all doctors combined have spent talking to me in my life probably, a super-upbeat lady with a long string of letters after her name mixed me up several opaque bottles of liquid plant. They have fun names like monk’s pepper and calendula and glycyrrhiza glabra (bless you!), and are supposedly combined in proportions specifically for my person. Overall I’d liken the visit to what I imagine an apothecary or sea-witch used to do, but without any sinister undertones.
So now every morning I wake up, pad to the kitchen and measure seven millilitres of a brown, slightly viscous substance into a special measuring cup. I top it off with water, prepare a seltzer chaser and throw the contents as far back as possible into my mouth so I can get it down without too much dry retching. This procedure is repeated again in the evening and, depending on how I am feeling, sometimes accompanied by a third elixir that makes the previous two taste like Sunny D in comparison. But does it work, you ask? To state the obvious, I am not a doctor and you should probably disregard everything I say. At the very least though, my symptoms have improved. And if the effect is placebo, well, all the more reason to believe.
