The tracks on Sophia Duccini’s EP, Lies We Told were written in a burst years ago, at a time when Duccini was accustomed to creating music that was acoustic and unprocessed, each song born out of brass and wood and ivory. Then they sat in quiet, just scratches of words on paper, demos locked away on a hard drive. Duccini had been assembling a team of prolific Seattle collaborators to help bring them into the studio, including Jeremy Buller, Michael Porter, Keelan O’Hara, Andy Park, and experimental percussionist Sean Lane. When the time came to start recording, the music took on a new character—that of oscillators and pulses and waves.
“They started as folksy acoustic songs, but Michael brought atmosphere to them with electric guitar, Keelan and Jeremy brought rhythm and movement, Sean and Andy’s work added texture.”
In a refusal to overthink the message at the core of the songs, they remained lyrically unchanged. Songwriters often throw salt in their wounds or douse stories in allegory in order to make the words they sing more compelling, but Duccini held onto their original directness. Despite having been translated instrumentally through more electronic and intangible mediums, the songs’ words remained elegiac and vulnerable.
“I’m not the kind of person who writes lyrics by going over them again and again. My goal is that they should be honest expressions of myself.”
In the melancholy retrospective Come Back, Duccini sings, “I didn’t know that I’d be your home / That I’d be your ghost / That I would be lost without your voice.” Even sheathed in swirling synths and spectral ambient sound, the simple pathos of the words remains front and center. “You come back / Just come back / Please come back.”
Like a sad, gorgeous daydream, Lies We Told shimmers throughout with unabashed, defiant nostalgia, tapping into the strangely human joy of dancing with one’s own ghosts.
Lies We Told was engineered, mixed, and co-produced by Andy Park (Pedro The Lion, Now Now, Noah Gundersen) at The Hall of Justice. It will be released on Feb. 14th, 2019, and will be available on all digital platforms.
~Dustin Stoddart