O+S

O+S, Orenda Fink (Azure Ray, High Up) and Cedric LeMoyne (of Remy Zero), will release their long awaited sophomore album You Were Once the Sun, Now You're the Moon on April 22 (Record Store Day). The album is a Record Store Day exclusive, limited to 500 copies and can be ordered digitally in the Saddle Creek Store.

O+S released their critically acclaimed, self-titled debut album in 2009. The album reflected a mutual love of shoegaze, field recordings and David Lynch soundtracks the pair had cultivated over roughly two decades of friendship, a friendship that could be traced back to a shared coming of age in the Birmingham, AL music scene of the 90's. Follow up album You Were Once the Sun, Now You're the Moon was produced by O+S and Jeffrey Cain in Birmingham, Alabama and mixed by Andy LeMaster in Athens, Georgia. It also includes musical contributions from friends Joey Waronker (Atoms For Peace, Beck), Zac Rae (Death Cab For Cutie, Fiona Apple) & David Levita (Tim McGraw, Faith Hill) among others.

About You Were Once the Sun, Now You're the Moon Orenda Fink says:

You Were Once the Sun, Now You're the Moon was at one point scrapped. Put away, not intended to be completed. Cedric, resigned, told me, "I'm sorry, I can't finish it. You can have these songs. Use them as solo songs." But that didn't feel right to me, because they weren't solo songs. They were O+S. Cedric and I wrote and recorded most of these songs five years ago in Birmingham, Alabama.

Cedric was in the midst of crippling grief, having just lost his best friend, Gregory Slay of Remy Zero to cystic fibrosis. Gregory had been a big part of the first O+S record as well, and we intended our second record to be a goodbye letter to him of sorts. We wrote about him, for him, sampled beats and music from recordings he'd left behind, and built songs around them, so that it was almost as if he was writing with us. Cedric asked me to write words that reflected his loss, the deep chasm that Gregory's death had left within him. Cedric was the music man, I was the lyricist. But it wasn't hard, especially as my 15 year old dog lay beside us in the studio, laboring breath, shaking legs. I knew he didn't have much time left, and I knew there was nothing I could do to keep him from dying.

So, we let ourselves fully inhabit our biggest existential hurdle: the fear and pain of death. And then five years passed… About six months ago, I woke up one morning and said, "We have to finish this record." We brought it to our long time friend, Andy LeMaster, who song by song, resurrected our initial creation and breathed a new life into it. Cedric and I both wept when we first listened to the mixes. It just brought back- I don't know- cicadas, the heavy air of Alabama, the dark windy roads to Jeffrey Cain's studio, the UFO Cedric saw from the balcony of our apartment, Gregory, Wilson, all of it. We're not going to tour or play any of this material live, but we thought it should finally exist in the world somewhere outside of a hard drive and we'd like to thank Saddle Creek for giving us the opportunity to release it.