“Gentle Chaperone” covers quite a few thematic bases. “It’s an ode to emotional dislocation, magical thinking, death and transformation,” says the Seattle-based Jesse Sykes who, with Phil Wandscher, forms the creative crux of the Sweet Hereafter.
Available November 28, Forever, I’ve Been Being Born (Southern Lord/Ideologic Organ) is the first full-length LP from Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter since 2011’s Marble Son. With everything on the new LP, Sykes was “striving to connote tenderness and a state of grace in the wake of resolution,” she says.
“I was coming out of a bad depression at the time, relieved I wanted to pick up my guitar again after a long dry spell,” says Sykes. “Also, I was paying homage to the knowledge of the emerging, menacing undertone in the collective psyche that was bigger than me, which might have been what compelled me to pick it up that day back in 2015.”
In the decade prior to falling off the radar, the Sweet Hereafter released three critically lauded albums that cultivated a unique psych-Americana sound inhabited by Sykes’ ethereal vocals. Sykes also gained recognition for her freeform collaborations, most notably with art-metal bands Sunn O))) and Boris. Wandscher co-founded alt-country pioneers Whiskeytown with Ryan Adams and recently recorded and toured with the Mekons’ Jon Langford. He’s also worked with Marissa Nadler, who makes her mark on Forever as a special guest.
A talented visual artist, Sykes offers insight into the long break between albums in a revelatory 45-minute excerpt from a self-made documentary currently in the works. “I must also mention I wrote ‘Gentle Chaperone’ right before our beloved dog died,” says Sykes. “She was almost 16 at the time, and I knew it was coming. She was at my feet when it was written, so she’s enmeshed in the body of the song. I was consoling myself and my future self, knowing she’d be gone by the time the song would see the light of day. Songs are time machines, portals. She’s right there inside of it now, and also immortalized in this video, eating her snow—which was all she wanted to do the last few weeks of her life.”
We’re proud to premiere Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter’s “Gentle Chaperone.”
—Hobart Rowland
