Eye of the Storm Georgia Harmer

• 1 Can We Be Still 03:54
• 2 Eye of the Storm 04:51
• 3 Little Light 03:20
• 4 Slow Down 03:42
• 5 Last Love 04:56
• 6 Hazel vs. The Coyote 03:37
• 7 Take It On 04:50
• 8 Farmhouse 03:47
• 9 Time To Move On 02:51
• 10 Memory Lullaby 02:58
• Total Runtime 38:46

Info zu Eye of the Storm

Georgia Harmer’s sophomore album, Eye of the Storm, is an empathetic exchange between past and future selves, and a deep breath of life into the veins of relationships over time. Where Harmer’s 2022 debut, Stay In Touch, chronicled introspection and growth, the heart of Eye of the Storm lies in the deeper matter of self-realization and understanding. It seeks to answer questions of what to carry, what to leave behind, and what to follow forward.

Self-produced by Georgia’s steady hand, the songs of Eye of the Storm are raw, real, vulnerable and detailed. The title track joins the idyllic “Can We Be Still,” the delicate and tender “Little Light,” and the deeply introspective “Take it On” singles that subtly piece together the holistic vision that Georgia has for this record. Listen throughout for the creaks of living room chairs, the soft echoes of a back alley garage, or the earliest seeds of ideas, brought to life on front porches and in backyard studios. Eye of the Storm captures the way music sounds when made with one’s most trusted confidantes, when ideas are given space to breathe, with precise intention and a naturally evolving vision coming to fruition.

An older sister to her debut Stay In Touch, which chronicled periods of introspection and growth, Eye of the Storm distills memories and dreams, arriving at a place of self-awareness. Like an older sister, it contains the insight of someone who has learned that the weight of the world doesn't have to fall directly on her shoulders. It captures first-time feelings in the rearview mirror, with the depth of understanding and intuition of someone who’s spent years paying close attention. “I wrote this album over the course of a number of years, so there’s a lot of growth captured between songs,” says Harmer.

She started writing the title track when she was only 18, rediscovering and finishing it years later. Now 26, the result is both reflection and resolution, a shedding of past heaviness and a turn to lightness. “Take it On” continues the conversation, confronting Georgia’s own feelings about her past; it’s an exploration of her closest relationships. “I get very caught up in the emotional world of others, sucked into the vortex of trying to navigate their inner landscapes, through empathy, the impulse to fix and heal, the desire to be let in,” Georgia says.

Relationships of all kinds are at the heart of the record, elemental to Georgia’s music and the songwriter and person she is on the whole. “My songs tend to use my relationships with other people to uncover truths about my own experience, or to communicate something unspoken to them.”

“Hazel vs The Coyote” grieves the loss of her aunt's two cats through dream-like scenes that shift in perspective. “Last Love” explores how devotion and uncertainty about forever can coexist in a romantic relationship. “Farmhouse” weaves shared memories into an apology love-letter to a friend. “Slow Down” travels through memories of her mother’s childhood, searching for stillness. We find that theme of stillness throughout the album. The first track envisions a lifetime of closeness, asking “Can We Be Still”? The guidance of “Little Light” shows us that we can. By the end of the album, “Time to Move On” leads us out of the past, and forward into the present. We find a soft place to land on “Memory Lullaby”, a final reflection on movement and time.

Eye Of The Storm was recorded live off the floor in various locations that felt comfortable and homey to Georgia – friends’ backyard garage studios and living rooms. Days and months were spent layering texture and character into the songs. The result is stripped down, exposed and vulnerable. There’s thought in every movement and sound. “I know every corner of it, every vocal imperfection and creak in the background, because everything that made it to this final form was very much intended to be there.”

Georgia’s songs are inlaid into a lush world, where every sound is a character, and every arrangement is a house built to last. You can hear the dedication and effort of a group of people who took tremendous care to bring it to life; the depths of the personal relationships behind this album in the intuitiveness of its sound. Recorded and arranged with Dylan Burchell, Julian Psihogios, Ben Whiteley, Oliver LaMantia, Jasper Smith, Gavin Gardiner and Matt Kelly, Georgia has created a work that simultaneously recalls the setting it was captured in, and creates an entirely new world with a history of its own.

Georgia Harmer

Georgia Harmer
A flash of telepathic closeness shared between friends, the euphoric memory of a summer’s day so perfect you want to live inside it forever, the dusty heat of a Texas afternoon, a tingle of melancholy on a solo walk home after a party: these are some of the ineffable moments captured in expressive detail by Georgia Harmer on her debut album Stay In Touch (April 15, Arts & Crafts). With a wisdom and poise that belies her youthful age, Harmer has penned an emotionally resonant collection of songs that articulate the ways in which even the most fleeting experiences can forge bonds between strangers, create families out of friends, and one by one form the joys and sorrows that make up a life.

Though Stay in Touch is her first album, Harmer has been making music practically since birth. She hails from an artistic family, including her aunt and labelmate Sarah Harmer (Georgia’s parents, both professional musicians, met while playing in Sarah’s band). “I grew up having access to any and every instrument that I wanted. My dad would give me these little guitars that he would tune to an open chord so I could just strum and sing along,” she recalls. Harmer started recording her own songs at 10 and, while still a teenager, hit the road as a backing vocalist for Alessia Cara, touring and playing every late night TV program for eight months. But when it came time to make her own album, Harmer knew she needed to find her own people.

While the intimacy of her music evokes a solo folk artist strumming an acoustic guitar onstage, Harmer is a band person, playing in four different bands throughout elementary school (she’s 22 so this is recent history!). After dropping out of university to pursue music full-time, Harmer began jamming with jazz students at Humber College in Toronto; it was there she met the musicians who would help her shape Stay in Touch. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place the night Jasper Smith, who engineered and co-produced Stay in Touch, caught Harmer performing and offered to help her make a record.

Harmer and her new band of jazz school misfits—guitarist Dylan Burchell, drummer Julian Psihogios, and bassist David Maclean—assembled to record at ArtHaus in Dufferin Grove, a lively, tree-lined Toronto neighborhood full of young families. “It’s essentially a garage converted into a recording studio, and it’s meant for overdubs and writing sessions, but we somehow managed to fit an entire band’s live recording setup in there,” says Harmer. “It was nice because we could just play how we’re used to playing, crammed in a room together, and capture the natural feeling of that.” Smith didn’t tell Harmer that he had never engineered a record before until after it was complete.

Despite their stripped-down recording process, there is nothing lo-fi about Stay in Touch. It spans everything from intimate folk and strummy country to sophisticated jazz and pop-kissed rock. Harmer and her band created musical landscapes that live up to the lyrical richness of the songs. “The band completely understood the world the songs needed to exist in,” says Harmer. The record sparkles with the lightning in a bottle feel of a band in thrall to their musical chemistry, adding more depth to the record’s themes. Stay in Touch is inspired both by the relationships of Harmer’s past and the joy of finding your people in the here and now.

For Harmer, music has always been a way “to process what was going on under the surface of a moment, a way for me to understand in retrospect what something meant.” The tone is set with album opener “Talamanca,” a song that begins with a story about a trip to Mexico and expands to encompass the communion that can occur between close friends—”Speaking without words/ Languages of seeing and being seen.” The arrangement is built around Harmer’s evocative voice and bass harmonics contributed by Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station, Julia Jacklin) with reverb giving the song a dream-like texture to reflect Harmer lyrically moving through her memories.

A similar theme is explored on “Headrush,” a sunny pop song that captures the bittersweet sensation of being so happy you’re almost sad, a yearning to capture a moment in time like a beam of light refracting on a suncatcher. The dusty, grungy “Austin” recalls a day on tour with Cara in Texas, when a homesick Harmer felt particularly connected to her father and his own experiences as a touring musician. Harmer’s father plays lead guitar on the track; they recorded his contribution in the family dining room.

Harmer calls herself a sentimental person, and Stay in Touch is full of romanticism—a rare quality in an irony-soaked culture. The closest Harmer gets to irony is on “All In My Mind,” a song that looks back on a relationship where she was made to feel crazy. Transforming a “hard experience” into the record’s breeziest rock song “is sort of like a little bit mocking, which to me is empowering,” says Harmer. “To be like, I'm rocking out! You’re able to sort of laugh at something, and to think, ‘Well that was dumb of you.’”

Intelligence, vulnerability, sincerity, play—these are what make Stay in Touch an unforgettable statement from a new artist with a heartbreakingly simple message: when you stay in touch with the experiences that have shaped you, you stay in touch with yourself. For Harmer, this is a record about “staying in touch with the aspects of yourself, your life, the world, that keep you aware of what's most important. Whether that's people, relationships, deep feelings, the value of togetherness and support. It’s about finding the balance between holding on and letting go, between the beauty of the world and the pain in the world.”

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet