Blind Pilot

The past isn’t finished with us yet. Love can be like that, too. A couple of years ago I found love in different forms leaving my life at once. In a single month I lost my closest group of friends, my 13 year relationship ended, and my dad was diagnosed with cancer. I had just stopped touring to write the next Blind Pilot album, but instead I was watching each of my plans unthread as a new season pulled forward relentlessly.

Avoiding suffering, is avoiding real happiness too. My reason to tell this story isn’t because it broke me and pinned me breathless. There was suffering, but those two years, as I moved to my hometown to help my parents through my dad’s sickness and eventually his death, also brought me true closeness, a deeper will to care and hope, and many moments of beauty I can barely describe.

This album came from love for my family, my town, my friends, my community. We don’t have to be so afraid of loss. We can speak and share its name, knowing we are together in it. If these songs are invitations to talk about loss and death, the invitation is to talk closely of the courage we find when we face loss honestly, cracked open and unsure of what we will become.

From the cliffs of Big Sur to the North Carolina backwoods - Molly Sarlé brings open-hearted, unflinching songwriting perfect for late-night karaoke comedowns, plaintive morning walks, and conjuring the spirit world. West Coast incantations with a warm, Appalachian glow.

Her debut solo LP Karaoke Angel is a collection of songs by a woman who was born understanding that her ability to feel - deeply and without shame - is her greatest strength. It is the result of a free and open-hearted devotion to the search for passion, and the complete, unwavering depiction of truth. Molly’s songs observe their own kind of internal logic, always a few steps behind or ahead of where you expect them to be - occasionally funny, always uncannily real.

The work on Karaoke Angel began in a trailer on the pacific coast and continued with stints in Los Angeles, CA, and Durham, NC. Recorded by Sam Owens (Sam Evian) in a church-turned-recording studio in Woodstock, NY, a minimal but carefully assembled palette of guitar, bass, and percussion form the foundation; an orchestra of unrecognizable atmospherics bounce off the high ceilings—but Molly’s mosaic, expressive voice is always at the center.