Raised Quaker, Skylar Gudasz was thinking a lot about violence when she wrote “Atoll,” the latest single from her upcoming LP, Country, available August 9 on Perseids Records.
“I was reading literature of revolution that was making me confront violence and my theoretical pacifism in a very serious way,” says the North Carolina singer/songwriter. “Somewhere I stumbled on these U.S. military propaganda videos of nuclear-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands in the 1950s, and the song came through in response to that.”
Particularly discomfiting to Gudasz was the name of the bomb they were testing: Bravo. “It was chilling to read all these military terms I recognized from theater and performance,” she says. “The song is about the ways language and art can be used to distance ourselves from the reality of the violence we enact. But violence isn’t a metaphor, you know. It’s incredibly real.”
As with most of Country, Gudasz recorded “Atoll” with Lost In The Trees’ Ari Picker and an assortment of other accomplished Carolina players, including Casey Toll (H.C. McEntire), Chessa Rich, Sarah Louise and Joe Westerlund (Califone, Bon Iver).
“We did it in one take as a scratch that ended up being the song,” says Gudasz. “I’d just written it, and I wasn’t even completely confident in the lyrics or form, since it was mostly just a repetitive meditation. Ari stacked ghostly vocal doubles and added some of his own—those are some of my favorite moments. It’s one of those songs where I almost feel like I didn’t write it. It arrived completely as is, and I didn’t really change it.”
We’re proud to premiere Skylar Gudasz’s “Atoll.”
—Hobart Rowland
