https://youtu.be/mVWtO5qKDX8

On Deeper Woods, the verdant forest that surrounds Sarah Louise’s North Carolina home can be felt with each note. Louise’s poetic depictions of nature both lyrical and musical are animated and reverent. Lauded for her work as an accomplished 12-string solo guitarist, Deeper Woods is the first album to prominently feature her voice. Louise enriches her warm singular vocal sound with a lush variety of instruments as well as layers of harmonies that together create a tapestry of texture. Steeped in Appalachian folk traditions, Louise’s influences are much broader with shades of psychedelia and experimentalism, pushing her beyond genre constraints. Incorporating both traditional and modern methods of composition, Deeper Woods is a reflection on the struggle between peaceful isolation and the need for community. Sarah Louise’s Deeper Woods is as vivid in its beauty as it is transcendent.

Louise, an avid naturalist and forager, draws from the guidance that the natural world provides. Whereas portrayals of women in nature are often demeaning and powerless, a folk waif, Louise uses songs such as “Pipevine Swallowtails” to reframe them more powerfully. By reframing traditional music styles and lyricism with a feminist stance, Deeper Woods blends the spiritual with the cerebral. Sarah Louise is actively blending natural themes with explorations of complex emotions. The Appalachian valley is the setting for her stories of independence, solitude, and awe. “Bowman’s Root” and “Fire Pink And Milkweed” take their names from plants that grow on the edges of meadows, reflecting the album’s central theme of liminality. These liminal spaces and complicated emotions are made ever clearer by Louise’s nuanced performances and arrangements, with subtle melodic flares and delicate, sometimes dramatic, shifts in atmosphere.

The compositions of Deeper Woods are Louise’s most ambi.......
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