Sylvan Esso: All You Need Is Love
Three years after crossing over into the indie-mainstream with their Grammy-nominated sophomore LP, Sylvan Esso return with another set of pop tunes designed for some sacred, sonic spaces.
When Amelia Meath was three years old, she was moved to tears by The Who’s melancholy folk-rock epic “Behind Blue Eyes.”
“I remember my dad turning around in our Mazda, looking at me in my car seat and being like, ‘What is going on?,’” she says.
The eternal glow of the radio, the magic of an instantly hummable pop melody—that theme runs throughout Meath’s work with Sylvan Esso, the electro-pop duo she co-founded in 2013 with her nowhusband, producer Nick Sanborn. Earning that kind of universal influence could mean being formed to play games within the music industry or becoming “slave to the radio,” as she sings on “Radio”— writing one killer chorus can catalyze an entire career, but it also fuels the capitalistic grind of building an ever-expanding audience.
On “Train,” a click-clack synth anthem from their third LP, Free Love, Meath continues a lyrical series about that very duality: “Pop music makes me go insane,” the singer croons over Sanborn’s sparse electronics and throbbing synth.
“It’s born out of frustration,” she says of the song, noting that the band’s expanded profile—their second LP, 2017’s What Now, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Album and peaked at No. 32 on the Billboard 200—brought its own unique set of mental hurdles to clear. “Our friend Dev [Gupta], who toured as part of WITH [a 2019 trek featuring an expanded lineup], had a really beautiful observation: ‘You really hit it big, but I bet you feel smaller than ever because you can see how big you actually can get.’ It drives you fucking nuts.”
“I even talk about Instagram on that song,” she adds. “The minute we got 100,000 followers, all of a sudden, everybody that I saw on Instagram had, like, a million followers. The song is partially acknowledging the reality that, no matter what we do, we’re at the bottom of the barrel. And also, we’re swimming in a sea of excellent songs that were made by people at the bottom who are also striving to get to the top. That song is partially about trying to convince myself that it’s worth it to write a really poppy song when I know so many incredible pop songs that have just been completely forgotten.”
For Sanborn, who played with the psych-folk outfit Megafaun and recorded as Made of Oak before crossing over into the indie-mainstream, the weight of that success was heaviest heading into What Now. “I’ve been touring in different bands for my entire adult life, to some extent, without any actual tangible success,” he says. “So when it came time to do a second album, I was worried that we were going to break it or that it was going to be a fluke or that we’d fuck it up somehow—those things you tell yourself when you kind of have a bit of that imposter syndrome or negative spiral. And there are new pitfalls all the time.”
For Free Love, the challenge wasn’t simply not fucking up. It was following the emotional arc of their songs, instead of tailoring them to the size of their audience.
“We were just getting to the point where we were playing to thousands of people,” he says. “You make a thing in your bedroom, and then you hear it on a giant sound system or you’re playing it at fucking Coachella for 35,000 people and you start to feel like, ‘If I don’t fill this space for these people, then they’re not going to be interested in it.’ It’s easy to lean into big, fast, loud things.”
But that approach isn’t always wise. The duo played around with a wider range of sounds while working on their third record, the first they tracked at their recently constructed studio, Betty’s— located on an idyllic 10-acre spot in Chapel Hill, N.C. By the fall, though, they started to lose confidence in the material, prompting them to book the experimental, six-date WITH tour. Recruiting eight other musicians, they radically transformed the arrangements of their back catalog, utilizing unexpected flourishes of saxophone, duel percussion and vocal harmonies.
When they got back to the studio, the musical couple had a fresh perspective on their in-progress material. Suddenly, they realized, a Sylvan Esso song could be anything they wanted it to be: any instruments (or lack thereof ), any emotion—as long as they were both confident in the direction.
“I was shocked just how much those [WITH] shows felt exactly like Sylvan Esso shows,” Sanborn says. “I thought they would feel totally different and crazy, but it still felt like us, even though we were doing these wildly different arrangements. It showed me the shape of something that we had been building that I couldn’t otherwise have seen because I was inside of it.
“That was probably about halfway through recording the record,” he continues. “And it gave me the total confidence to let all of the songs just be what they were. People were [at the shows] because, when Amelia and I make things, this certain section of the population responds to it the way that we respond to it. It gave me the confidence that we could be very quiet and it would still feel like our band and people would respond. There are a bunch of drum tracks on this record, and I would have felt insecure about leaving them that way before that tour. We can be bombastic. But it’s incredibly important to also be very quiet. I think we’re about the spectrum.”
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Free Love is still full of bangers: “Numb” is the obvious heavyweight, built on gurgling synths, shifty beats and a dynamic range of whisper-quiet to speaker-rattingly loud. In classic Meath fashion, the lyrics work on two levels—beckoning you to dance while also capturing emotional paralysis.
“I wanted to write a song about what it’s like to be in the midst of true, absolute slack-jaw depression, trying to softly welcome yourself back into the world,” she says. “I realized that I’ve been kind of reaching for the same songs on all the records we’ve been making, and I feel like I’ve finally realized them. I’ve been wanting to do a procedural ‘dance’ song forever. You can kind of hear me reaching toward it on [2014’s] ‘Coffee.’ I’ve been wanting to do a 1950s ‘Cool Jerk’/‘Twist’ kind of song.”
“We got really into house and dance music in general while we were making this,” she adds. “We just started listening to all of Four Tet’s DJ sets while we were driving to the studio—that might be something we’re going to reach for next. Like real dance dance music.”
And “Train” fulfills Meath’s goal to write a song that’s “almost disgustingly” catchy. “I’ve been working on sass,” she says.
But the set doesn’t live in those boomy, stadium-friendly spaces—it frequents the quiet, fragile zones between the anthems. “Frequency” is a glorious slow build to a climax that never comes, with Sanborn wrangling drama from static-y synth chords. “What If” opens the record with a wash of underwater vocoder, and closer “Make It Easy” finishes its sentence sonically.
“Rooftop Dancing” is designed around an acoustic-electronic blend, with feather-light guitar plucks and looped, wordless vocals unfolding over a beat made primarily from shakers and a squeaky kick drum.
“I take a lot from people like The Books and especially Boards of Canada—they were the first people I listened to who would record their own instruments but then make them sound like they had been sampled,” Sanborn says. “It points to this thing that I think about a lot: the subliminal nature of somebody knowing that you’re playing them a recording and how that infuses a sound with this inherent sense of nostalgia for the immediate moment. The idea that it was recorded and played back becomes a part of the whole feeling to me.”
Sanborn’s organic sound design glues the album together—a hand-crafted recording alternative that rises above the drag-and-drop approach of many modern beat-makers. “With a lot of the Sylvan Esso stuff, I want each sound to be a part of the story,” he adds. “And I feel like that’s a lot harder for me to do when I don’t make them myself. [I do that] almost to a fault. Also, I spend way too much time on all this stuff. It’s very satisfying—but in the nerdiest way possible.”
But that’s not to say that he’s against using pre-crafted loops: “Everything’s just a frame—you know what I mean?” he says. “Even with our musical ideas, we are reacting to and stealing from everyone who came before us all the time, whether or not it’s intentional. The minute you start seeing production as a curatorial process, it becomes a lot easier to forgive yourself for things [like using loops].”
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Free Love strikes a natural ebb and flow between intensity and sensitivity, humor and heaviness—10 tunes, 30 minutes, zero wasted seconds. “I love a 10-track record,” Meath says. “It’s incredibly satisfying. When I see that something is 16 tracks, I think that’s a sign of not knowing exactly what you’re trying to say. Maybe it’s also because we’re a pop band—that’s why 16-track records confuse me. You just know one of those tracks is a cover of ‘Abracadabra.’”
Now Meath and Sanborn, like the rest of the music world, are longing for that time not long ago when bands were able to promote their albums on the road. They were lucky to even get through Free Love: The pair were mixing the album in LA with BJ Burton when the COVID-19 pandemic started raging across the U.S., forcing them to “hit the escape button,” as Meath describes.
“We were kind of in this weird limbo,” she says. “We were just so fucking sad and freaked out. Also, the weirdest part is that this is our best record. We were really gearing up to fucking go for it—a two-and-a-half-year touring cycle—really just slam. For a month, we were totally frozen and terrified and upset. And then we realized that we couldn’t hold the record because it’s so much about right now. [‘What If’] is about the world actually ending and starting from the beginning again. We realized that it was the perfect record to put out during the pandemic, when the country’s on the brink of fascism and everyone’s realizing that we’ve been in a stew of white supremacy.”
Free Love does tap into the emotional landscape of 2020, often by highlighting communal relics of what now feels lost like a lost age: “Concrete, concrete shining everywhere/ Moonlight’s bright, and the kids don’t care/ Meet me at the streetlight, gonna take you there,” Meath gently coos on “Rooftop Dancing.” And it’s hard not to long for a time when dancing even existed.
Meath’s still struggling with that herself. She’d already started visualizing the album onstage—how the songs would flow into each other, how the crowd would react to their gradual climbs and euphoric peaks. Sylvan Esso had a number of marquee dates on the books, including hosting Bonnaroo’s signature SuperJam in June. For now, all she can do is daydream.
“Man, it’s so sad to talk about,” she says. “Like, I don’t know the next time I’m going to get to be in a dark room full of people dancing, the next time I am going to be able to exercise my demons with other people. [I pictured] that when we got to the last track of the record, ‘Make It Easy,’ I could get the audience to sing with me as we ramped up the noise jam. I’m gonna cry thinking about it. I can’t fucking wait.”
For now, Sylvan Esso are celebrating what they accomplished before the world collapsed: a finished album, a finished studio, a suddenly cleared schedule with more time to examine the finer details of projects like visuals and packaging. “We’ve never actually had the time to do [those things],” Meath says. “And now, all of a sudden, we do—which is both great and bewildering, considering that, before this, every aspect of trying to get people to listen to the record was so that they would buy tickets to our show.”
When live music finally returns, Sylvan Esso will still savor creating those sacred spaces—just like the greatest pop always have.
“I’ve always wanted to reach toward an art form that everyone feels the right to have a relationship with or the right to judge,” Meath says. “Music is really easy for that. But pop music is even easier. Everyone feels like they can decide whether or not a pop song is good. And a pop song is literally holding its hand out to everybody: ‘Come with me. Let me take you to a different place.’ Pop is one of those magical genres where sometimes everybody decides that a record is good, like every Beatles record. It’s so magical. It becomes part of the pulse of the world.”
