Sandhill Crane Erisy Watt

• 1 Sandhill Crane 03:15
• 2 Tear Apart 03:41
• 3 Arrows 04:25
• 4 Anywhere With You 03:49
• Total Runtime 15:10

Info for Sandhill Crane

“I wrote through all of it,” says musician Erisy Watt in referring to the changes 2023 held for her, “the anticipation, the upheaval, and the aftermath.” In a short span, Erisy entered a new decade, lost a loved one, saw the end of a relationship, flew halfway around the world to work in remote regions of Thailand and Indonesia, returned home, packed up her life in Portland, and moved to Los Angeles. “Showing up at my desk with pen, paper, and guitar each morning in the midst of navigating such uneven terrain allowed me to process and feel more grounded.”

Hailed by No Depression as “what contemporary folk sounds like at its peak,” Erisy’s music often harkens comparisons to 60s singer-songwriters. But on her third album, ‘not either or but everything,’ she shakes the sound loose from the tenets of decade or genre. From the cosmos to the kitchen sink, lyrically, Erisy’s art is in connection, and on this new offering she hones an even deeper acuity for tracing the through line, peering through both telescope and microscope in search of the common threads.

Beyond the lyrics, Erisy remarks, “I started feeling an opening up with the guitar, putting a finger somewhere at random on the fretboard, building a chord around it, and from there, allowing a song to come through. I was faced with all this empty space to fill, which felt scary but also gave me the opportunity to explore my edges, and in turn, be more open and expressive.”

Erisy connected with Luke Temple (Adrianne Lenker, Hand Habits) in the first week she moved to Los Angeles at a nude figure drawing night that he was hosting weekly. Having met him earlier in the year on another project, they reconnected and made a plan, resulting in a collaboration that Erisy describes as “a total dream and absolute joy.” Recording live over five days at drummer Kosta Galanopoulos’s home studio in Long Beach, along with Will Graefe on guitar, Erisy found freedom in a new cohort and fresh philosophy. She says, “Luke moves quickly but doesn’t rush. He gives care and attention without being too precious. We’d scrap things and try again. We’d goof off, and we’d go deep. It felt easy, electric, expansive.” Additional engineering by Riley Geare and mastering by Heba Kadry (Björk, Sufjan Stevens) provided the finishing touches. The result is an album ranging from earthy to cosmic, strikingly spare to deliciously textured, contemplative to outright playful. ...

Erisy Watt

Erisy Watt
Erisy’s sound reliably alludes to iconic vocalists of the 1960s, but here, finds a more fitting home in the vintage-tinged indie ether of Bedouine, Haley Heynderickx, or Julie Byrne. Her vocals are intimate and alluring, an artful alternation between soothing whispers and gentle howls, backed by an instrumental bigness that evokes windy mountainscapes and piercing blue skies. Throughout Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy calls upon the expanse of earth and sky to navigate life as an adult woman—satiating restlessness, finding connection, and fostering that ever elusive sense of self that allows one peace.

Erisy Watt grew up in Nashville, but it wasn’t until she left the city of music for college in California that she began writing her own songs. Both of these formative settings are present in her creative instinct—Nashville’s knack for a timeless melody, California’s bewildering vastness and dusty free spirit—but upon these sonic bones lives a body of global adventure. Erisy is an environmental professional with a deep fondness for nature, and has spent time in eclectic locales like Nepal, Thailand, and Hawaii, most often in rugged, remote wilderness. She approaches the music profession with a similar sense of purity; she once toured Europe on foot, banjo on her back. This wide-open way of moving through a capacious planet enlivens Erisy’s music with true troubadour soul. Her songs spring not so much from one place in particular as from a series of well worn travel journals.

This stretch of inspiration calls for acute musical capacity, and fortuitously, Erisy no doubt knows what she’s doing. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, she can walk up and down a fretboard in gymnastic jazz chords, craft complex guitar patterns in a wide range of tempos, and masterfully press her vocal performances past previous limits. In the midst of recording her debut album in 2018, Erisy underwent surgery to remove a problematic polyp on her vocal cord. While the diagnosis and procedure proved traumatic, Erisy discovered a new vocal freedom in the healing process. Today, she describes the feeling of being uninhibited, both physically and creatively, as integral to her artistic evolution. The transformation is most palpable on crossover hit "Big Sky," one of Erisy's oldest songs, which she polished to shine.

On Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy lets her newly liberated talent shimmer, but her real art is in connection: tracing the invisible vessels between an ocean’s black depth and a mountain peak’s twinkling tip, tracking the slow immensity of glacial paths to the monstrous canyons they carve. She ties her insides to the outside, taking tips from the cosmos, a naturalist with a knapsack of stardust, making luminescent the dark parts of her path, finding a way forward.

This album contains no booklet.