The music for “Daybreak The Spell” was one of the first things Rainshadower’s A. Ball put together for a debut album that’s been a long time coming.
“There was something about the sparseness and beautiful darkness about it that kind of laid the foundation for how I wanted the record to sound and feel,” says Ball.
As a drummer and multi-instrumentalist, Ball has been an integral part of the Seattle region’s music scene for decades, working with Cumulus, the Cops, Idiot Pilot, Dryland and many others. Available November 21, the self-released Charred Scars is his belated solo debut. Tracked at a studio tucked away in an early-20th-century Catholic church in the waterfront town of Anacortes, Wash., it’s a bracing personal statement equally inspired by the internal and external—in particular, the looming alpine beauty of the Cascade Mountains and surrounding forests that were so much a part of his upbringing.
“I go for a walk pretty much every day of the year regardless of the weather,” says Ball. “I often walk through the natural areas and forests in and around Bellingham. There’s so much beauty here, even in the cold, dark, damp months. But, man, those months can be long.”
Ball’s first serious foray into songwriting came in 2012 after a bout of acute appendicitis. He couldn’t play drums for several months, so he began demoing songs with a bass guitar and the Fender Rhodes piano that would become a dreamy, melancholic signature of Rainshadower’s sound.
“The Rhodes melody on ‘Daybreak The Spell’ is simple and lullaby-like, but the sound itself is so unique—dreamy and gauzy, like the months of gray that descend upon us annually every year here in the Pacific Northwest,” says Ball. “It felt like rain to me … beautiful but also kind of cold and dark.”
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Clyde Petersen shot and edited the video for “Daybreak The Spell,” using the song’s themes of reflection, regret, remorse and redemption as a jumping-off point. “The song is about how change is constant, and the fact that you’re either adapting and growing with change or you’re stagnant,” says Ball. “You can resist change all you want, but it’s still going to happen.”
We’re proud to premiere Rainshadower’s “Daybreak The Spell.”
—Hobart Rowland
