by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
While best known as the bassist for sludge pop band Haybaby, Sam Yield is a most accomplished songwriter. His solo music takes a very different approach, built on lush acoustics and gentle reflections, part folk, part indie, and entirely consuming. He’s an impeccable guitar player and his compositions are warm and stunning throughout Terra Australis, his upcoming solo album, due out January 8th via Plastic Miracles (Oceanator, Sonny Falls, Calyx). It’s an album made with winter in mind, but the songs serve a comfort just as radiant as any fire place.
Following the release of the record’s first single, “A Winter Country,” comes “This Must Be.” Opening with some delightfully tangled finger picked progressions and a gentle hum, it’s one of the more stark folk constructions on Yield’s record. His words carry the bulk of the weight, but it’s in the instrumental segments where the beauty of it really flourishes, swooning like classical guitar structure dripped into a somber reflection of how we perceive and why we think things must be as we’re told they are.
Speaking about “This Must Be",” Yield shared:
“This song's about the end of a long drive I once took with someone. I remember one thing we talked about when I first met her was how strange it is that for centuries no modern theory of motion, founded on the principle of inertia, could emerge in the West because people were simply too convinced that the universe has a preferred structure and that things stop moving once they've reached their proper places in it, instead of drifting off to nowhere in particular.”