Thayer Sarrano

A beguiling Athens-based singer who casts an exquisite spell with her spare, ghostly songs that haunt the ears from a distance.” - Stomp & Stammer

“It's haunting, stirring music with melodies that infiltrate your consciousness.” - Bertis Downs, R.E.M.
“Peer in on the southern twang, almost gravely vocals and honest message that Thayer Sarrano portrays.” – WUOG 

With her latest release, Shaky, the multi-instrumentalist sounds more than ever like her roots, her places of origin. She grew up in a monastery, and the swamplands of coastal southern Georgia. Classically trained as a child, she always wrote instrumental compositions and poetry, even at a very young age. With chanting forever embedded in her subconscious, she awakened further, now to grunge of the 1990s. Songwriting came when she landed in the vibrant musical community of Athens, GA – where she is now based. She began to collaborate with friends, forming her own band, while establishing herself as a studio/touring session player. She has worked with Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven, T. Hardy Morris, of Montreal, Dave Marr, Kuroma, and David Barbe, among numerous others. In 2009, she released her debut album, King. This collection of songs prompted the magazine Americana UK to dub her “The New Queen of Shoegaze.” Sarrano displayed her skillful musicianship, recording the entirety of this sparse, raw album live in her living room, in just one day. In 2012, she released her follow up LP, Lift Your Eyes to the Hills. It featured more complex arrangements, and included the single “The Bend,” written for the Groninger Museum, located in the Netherlands. The success of that single prompted her consistent touring of Europe in the years that followed and into the present. Sarrano herself produced the record, along with Hank Sullivant (Kuroma, MGMT). The album was released independently, as part of a charitable campaign for Nuçi's Space, in conjunction with Camp Amped, a teenage retreat for aspiring rock musicians, to which Thayer remains passionately devoted. Of this album, Flagpole Magazine commented: “Featuring heavily spiritual themes, it could have collapsed under its own weight, but Hills manages to maintain a startling lightness of being.” Now, with Shaky, we see Sarrano at her bravest and most vulnerable.

Written in an unstable period of much loss, Shaky remains a record of grace and perseverance. The honest, painted lyrics weave personal experiences with the mystical. But to Thayer, it’s all real. “I feel like I have to make this quilt out of these patches of visions I’ve collected,” she says. “And then suddenly the song is finished, and I realize it’s all true.” We start to believe her that these seemingly abstract visions are really happening. And, in this other world, we see pictures to which we can relate. In the title track, we catch snatches of the elusive: “I trace your echo / I follow your lead / You're shaky, shaky / But you settle me.” In the song “Crease,” there are images of dissolving relationships: “Your memory unties my cells. / It breaks the line from your heart to mine.” In the song “Glimpses,” we find a quest for something existentially greater: “There's a world at the same time as this one. / It's bright, it trembles, it glistens.” In the track “Lost Art,” there are apparitions of beautiful ethereality: “Their hands are open, call to the wild / Layer landscapes, breaking the sky / I remember them from when I was a child / It’s the same little image from inside my eyes.”

Dovetailing the thick twang of the country with the airy, echoing, spacious feeling of an empty church, Sarrano has carved out a pocket in which her otherworldly music has room to breathe. Or perhaps the pocket was already there and Sarrano stumbled upon it, becoming a vector for something deep and soulful and strange. Regardless, once you’ve stepped into that pocket with her, you’re bound to want to return. 

more at http://www.thayersarrano.com