Experiencing Slow Magic is like entering into another dimension. Here are songs that stare at the fire, linger in rainbows, fall in slow motion like comets. Their sounds summon up Bobbie Gentry’s country heat, Scott Walker’s gutsy spirit and Linda Perhacs’ uncanny beauty. Hazy woodwind, warm guitars and spacey electronics, fed into malfunctioning tape machines, weave together and glimmer. As they descend into layers of reverb, we're pulled into the whirlpool with them.
The lyrics of Jenny Lindfors, who records as Sailing Stones, also remind me of when time felt both stretched and condensed, fractured and endless, in those strange, distant years when my life had recently created new life. In recent years, there have been many other albums about matrescence – the physical, psychological and emotional transition a woman goes through when becoming a mother – but don’t dismiss this as a trend. This is more a communal recognition – at long last – of an experience that affects more than half of human beings in so many mercurial, mind-bending ways.
Lindfors had her first child in 2020, the same year as she released her debut album, Polymnia. She had written music for years, but matrescence made her want to write about the way her emotions now crested and splintered, bubbled and softened, rallied then railed. “I remember telling my partner, I really want to write about this, but I'm too knackered, too sleep deprived.” She laughs. “I didn't know who I was anymore. But I wanted there to be a record that spoke to my joy and my pain and my thin-skinnedness like Joni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak. Not that I could write another Blue, but I knew I had to navigate the idea of writing about motherhood, especially as there's a lot of shame tied around it.”
In November 2020, she read a joint Quietus interview with Gazelle Twin and Saint Saviour called An Outlet To Scream: On Motherhood and Music-Making (full disclosure: I was in the interviewer’s chair). “Those women's words gave me permission to get started, to begin chucking ideas about motherhood into songs and seeing what happened next.” Lindfors attended writing workshops on fiction, discovering Liz Berry’s poems about motherhood, and books like Juliet Miller’s The Creative Feminine and Her Discontent: Psychotherapy, Art and Destruction, which explored the principle of maternal rage in creation. During a particularly difficult period, she underwent a transformative course of art therapy with a local charity, embodying her conflicting thoughts in paintings and collages. She also attended online classes at School of Song, which exposed her to the teachings of great songwriters, like Phil Elverum and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold.
With all of this guiding her, Lindfors' Slow Magic gradually started to unfurl. Its title comes from a mum friend who was telling her disappointed child how magic, as it happens on TV, wasn't possible. "[That] was fast magic and in real life it’s slow magic", Lindfors explains. "It happens just the same way, albeit so slowly you don’t notice.”
On these twelve psychedelic, poetic, panoramic songs, Lindfors ascribes each song to a different colour - feeding in her experiences of joy, dissociation, loneliness, rapture, desire and desperation. She produced these songs herself, set against haunting arrangements by her partner, composer Dan Moore. Some songs were recorded at home, and others were given lush overdubs in a chapel-turned-studio in rural West Wales.
She wanted their soundworld to echo her expansive, multi-faceted inner world, and to have an uncanny undercurrent of darkness. David Axelrod, The Electric Prunes and Jefferson Airplane were among her textural references. "I personally found the whole experience of early motherhood to be very psychedelic," she smiles.
The album begins with Innocence, and the pulses of an unborn baby’s heartbeat; a bass note on the guitar lingers darkly, unresolved, before the lyrics drift in. A song about "not wanting to return to your adult, messy life where you've made mistakes and not done things as well as you might have liked,” it’s about returning to your own identity and ego self, Lindfors says. "It's about wanting to stay in the playground.”
Gravity follows it, centred in the stillness of the final days of pregnancy, mixed in with the druggy onset of induced labour (“the midwife spurs the pain away/Her name is Violet/She speaks of colours/I have never seen before”). The Colour Of The Sun moves on a few years, recalling the specific moment when Lindfors’ toddler daughter heard Karen Carpenter's voice on the radio for the first time: “I just saw her face, and she was so overwhelmed by the beauty of it, she hugged me so tightly”. The song also mentions flowers on the roadside that she saw on that sunny day: “And I thought – that is somebody’s child. It’s a song about my maternal anxiety, about how terrible things can happen alongside the magical things, too.”
Many of Lindfors’ songs are like finely wrought vignettes. In Days Come, Days Go, Lindfors recalls her daughter falling “asleep on me again/The blankets of peace/The chaos circling silently”, an experience that reminded her of the drowsy, messy days of her youth. A Promise To Love hones in on fuzzy details from the early mornings Lindfors struggled to adjust to as a parent, which could be moments of celestial visitation or horror, depending on your perspective: “a ribbon of light/a line in the hallway/a voice in the doorway”, Lindfors sings.
Dreams of being alone, without responsibilities, are also explored in Euphoria: “It was five in the morning/A blank canvas street/No shackles back home/No one waiting for me “. Nature’s starkness attacks in Tips Of Green: “I broke a stalk/And out poured pale blood/Pale like the milk in me”). Moments of collapse break out in Tapering (“crying over a broken mirror/I called to my mother”), before focus comes again, a mother's senses zoning in on tiniest details (“A ball point pen/A naked eye/The basket weave wing of a butterfly”).
Inside so many of these songs circles an undeniable current: a recognition that life after matrescence will never be the same again.“Inside me, I felt the lights revolving,” Lindfors sings in the last track, Indigo, one written in the form of a Japanese haibun poem. She sang it in the early weeks of a second pregnancy that didn’t make it through. “Always on the watch,” she sings. “So deep in the thicket each day. This ink stain will never go away”.
In 2024, Lindfors gave birth to her second child, a son. This year, her gorgeous songs will also be travelling out into the world, providing twelve kaleidoscopic windows into recognisable worlds. They take me to a relationship that began long ago, but my matrescence still stretches and pulses, shaping so much of who I am, so much of what I do. The slow magic of its wooziest moments still sings deeply in my gut, in my bones, soul – and Lindfors knows, just like me, that they always will.
Jude Rogers