Saline Grace “Bar Moon”
Following the release of The Whispering Woods, Saline Grace highlights the massive impressive “Bar Moon,” unveiling a previously unreleased track, “Yearning.” Guitarscapes shower down, carrying beautiful melodic sensibility with a touch of sorrow. Yet the darker undertone evokes vivid imagery of bleak, barren lands and cliffy shorelines. “Bar Moon” remind you of birds fluttering their wings across the ocean and sacred chants echoing amongst walls.
With permeable strummings of strings that weave into picturesque natural scenery, “Bar Moon” is cold and isolated, but at the same time, refreshing and free. Between freedom and restraint, the modern poetic embrace of feelings and medieval goth aesthetic, “Bar Moon” talks about deception and revelation, the duality embedded in our human nature.
“Yearning” continues the drastic immersive drive down the shoreline, but in the reverberant stringscapes, the track longs for the distant shore, the unknown. As eager as it is inevitable, drifting away while moving forward. There’s a kind of Western determination in the mix of deep sounds. Secrecy and more stories are being whispered through the beating rhythm. “Yearning” is a flow and a burning, an overwhelming force and a gentle embrace.
Read our interview with Saline Grace where we talk about artistry and “Bar Moon.”
Punk Head: I love the post-punk aesthetic of “Bar Moon.” Can you tell us a little bit about the track?
Saline Grace: “Bar Moon” is about truthfulness or better said “missing truthfulness.”
We all play different roles in our short life, representing a kind of person that is requested by institutions or people within our society, a mask you can say. Due to group behavior, we are liars to others and to ourselves. Betrayal and hypocrisy define mankind’s daily routine, I would say. But the question is: Who is the real person in that human body? Do we know her or him?
Thinking about the original idea of “Bar Moon,” I have to go way behind our early years around 1997. In a different version, the song was the opening track of our very first demo tape. At this time I had a singer for my songs, we called us Nobility Of Salt and lived in London. Actually, the song was still part of our second tape in 1998, which received recognition from Holly Hernandez of Holly’s Demo Hell in the English music magazine Melody Maker. It was a funny review...Then I wrote more songs, we made albums and the idea was forgotten somehow, but from time to time it came up and I was haunted in a way. And now, almost thirty years later, I finally nailed the piece. By the way, the same story happened with “The Evening Prayer”... But these are exceptional cases in songwriting for me.
PH: As a prolific songwriter, what do you enjoy the most about music making?
Saline Grace: Writing, composing and arranging music. I do like to describe the process in similarity to painting. There is maybe an initial idea that forces me and pushes me into the process of writing and composing. After that, by luck, I have a skeleton of a song like a pencil on paper. And then begins the process of arranging and I can fill the song structure with colours like painting a white canvas. In the end, I feel, that the song’s life is completed. The piece dies and will be buried gracefully with other pieces on an album...This is the way I usually see it.
PH: What motivates you as an artist?
Saline Grace: I have no choice, it is a need, a compulsion! My albums are the remains. Resting musically for a longer time makes me definitely ill. And this is often difficult being bound into invidious jobs to earn a living.
PH: Who are your biggest inspirations?
Saline Grace: Leonard Cohen, And Also The Trees and Nick Cave, I suppose.
PH: What is the one thing that you’d like your fans to know about you?
Saline Grace: I don’t like people, most of them talk too much; I hate small talk. Mankind makes so much noise for nothing. But when you are a beautiful cat, either a big cat or a house cat, you are welcome and maybe you will get an autograph...
