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Today, we are excited announce Tomberlin's latest record, i don’t know who needs to hear this…, releasing on April 29th, 2022.
Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor’s kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut, At Weddings (2018), while living at home. For a while after leaving home and church, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked a day job and kept writing songs. She posted some of these songs to Bandcamp, which led to her signing a record deal with Saddle Creek. It all happened fast: Less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and she ended up moving to L.A. which is where she wrote Projections (2020), her EP followup to At Weddings.
During the pandemic, Sarah Beth was all over the place, physically and mentally. Louisville. Los Angeles. Back home in Illinois for a bit. Brooklyn, where she’s now settled, she says. Brooklyn is also where her new album i don’t know who needs to hear this… was recorded, at Figure 8 studios over the course of two weeks, with producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe (who played a variety of instruments on the collection), and later mastered by Josh Bonati, also in Brooklyn.
“The theme of the record,” she explains, “is to examine, hold space, make an altar for the feelings.” Hold space: Tomberlin’s songs do it literally, making it heard space. Her full-length debut, At Weddings, was widely praised for the sparsity and delicacy of its instrumentation, especially in contrast with the emotional heft of her lyrics.
Here, the space feels larger and holier, built to echo. Pedal steel. Old acoustic guitars, freshly plucked. A drifting synthesizer. Chill, brushy percussion. Ambient, expansive clarinet and saxophone. Aleatory piano trills, a lot of piddling with the occasional splash. The looseness and wideness of the arrangements conveys a tender regard for their parts, as though each arpeggio, loop, scratch is a found shell or feather in the hand. Then there is the instrument of her voice, which has the endearing quality of being perfectly tuned but reluctantly played. “I’m not a singer,” she sings on “idkwntht.” “I’m just someone who’s guilty.”
With Trying Not to Have a Thought, Algernon Cadwallader juggle intrinsic musical connection and shrewd lyrical intention with remarkable poise. The album’s title perfectly captures that dual approach: the effort to resist being mentally bogged down by the bottomless list of daily atrocities, and the band’s decision to let their unspoken connection guide this rejuvenated take on their classic sound. “This is just what comes out of us when these four people get in a room,” Helmis says. And this record is exactly that: an Algernon Cadwallader album that's leisurely, intensely, tremendously their own.
The 21st installment of Saddle Creek’s Document series features Whitmer Thomas, a multi-hyphenate whose unique vision has percolated across a range of mediums including TV, film, podcasts, and music. Tilt was recorded in Los Angeles with Jay Som and features contributions from Ian Farmer (Slaughter Beach Dog, Modern Baseball).
With I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, his debut for Saddle Creek, Dean Johnson makes a pact with the listener: He will sing you his truth in the most heartfelt and charming way possible, if you promise to keep an open mind.
