Maria Taylor

You shift in your seat, looking around at the other moviegoers scattered around you. The credits slowly begin rolling through the frame, the strings drift up and over the seats, the edges of the image slowly begin to darken, the audience leaves in twos and threes, joining hands, edging toward the exit. We sit in the twilit shadow of the theatre, and we sit alone, letting what we’ve just watched echo around us in the stillness. We know we’ve reached some sense of resolution, some ending, but nothing here quite feels like an ending. The houselights come up, the footlights dim, and the ushers quietly walk the aisles as we move slowly, blinking in the glow of the exit sign. Maria Taylor’s forthcoming album Story’s End’s songs sit within this same kind of hazy narrative world, almost as chapters, with subtle, brief flashes of color, texture, radiance, and warmth, and it indeed navigates some of the same emotional terrain of Taylor’s previous work: promises fade and are broken, relationships tangle and fragment, and we sleep with the cold, silvery void that follows. Taylor’s hushed vocals, the atmospheric, widescreen strings, the bell-like piano chords, the wide and open vistas that characterize her songs are all here, but with Story’s End, Taylor found more nuance and life to explore and mine–and within that nuance she found real solace. The project began slowly with Taylor building songs from demos, yet it was the spark of conflict that gave her the resolve and focus to complete the project. She relates, “After spending years working on this record, an irrevocable fracture in both my marriage and a friendship gave me the urgency to finish it. I think I needed to make something beautiful as things fell apart around me.” Begun in Taylor’s California home studio, the project eventually moved to Mike Mogis’ ARC Studios in Omaha where work continued in earnest. “I’d been practicing drums like a madwoman for a Bright Eyes tour, so I played drums on most of the record, Macey [Taylor] (Bright Eyes) came up and played bass, and Mike put guitar on some tracks. Then I gave it to Ben Brodin (First Aid Kit, Bright Eyes) who recorded a lot of my vocals, added much of the other instrumentation, and who ultimately produced it.” Longtime friend and collaborator Brad Armstrong (13 Ghosts, The Glass Hours) produced the pulsing single “Never Thought I’d Feel New,” a song that sits at the very heart of Story’s End. Also featuring Louis Schefano on drums (Regia, Remy Zero), “Never Thought…” finds Taylor wounded yet stronger, “chasing tunnel visions” attempting to “drown out” the dissonance of the monochromatic world around her. “It took five years to finish that song–I just could not find a chorus melody,” Taylor says. “Nik Freitas (the Mystic Valley Band, For Stars) helped me finish that melody so I knew he had to sing on it. And Brad and I have been friends since high school. I love working with him.” Armstrong also collaborated on “Shades of Blue,” a beatific, sweeping, string-laden missive that features a gauzy blanket of harmonies and Taylor reckoning with what has passed, and what has been left: “Just wait…it’ll be okay / All the while will pass the days / and you’ll belong to everything you do.” Further, Conor Oberst contributed lyrics/vocals to the slow-motion tumble of “Sorry I Was Yours” and lyrics to the gentle waltz of “Nathaniel.” Minnesota singer/songwriter Sally Dworksy, who has provided harmony vocals for R.E.M. and Peter Gabriel, and who contributed lead character vocals for The Lion King and Shrek among others, joins Taylor in providing the layered, ethereal harmonies that weave through Story’s End. The shimmering panoramic strings were arranged and recorded by Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes, First Aid Kit) at 64 Sound Studios in Los Angeles with Pierre DeReeder (Rilo Kiley). Really, a narrative can’t exist without one key component: transformation, the promise that what follows the horror is a small shred of hope, and that we aren’t