Sara Rachele is gearing up to release her new full-length LP, April Fool, on November 17th. April Fool is a nine track collection of atmospheric indie-Americana songs propelled by sparse instrumentation, keeping the focus on Rachele’s haunting Southern croon. Sprinkled throughout the album, Rachele presents original renditions of classic standards including a dreamy cover of The Beatles’ “If I Fell,” and a Phil Spector-meets-Hank Williams-esque cover of John Lilly’s “April Fool.”
“After getting illegally evicted from the East Village in New York, I didn’t really know what to do,” says Rachele, “So, I went to Nashville, and called my friend Johnny Duke.” In an effortless pairing, the two created a basic partnership—two young souls paired in a dark room with a tape machine and a set of songs, meeting briefly over the course of a few weeks to laugh, cry, meander, and record a stripped-down collection live, together, and simply.
Glide is delighted to premiere “We Will Meet Again” a smoky number with a riveting pulse that creates an aura of a roadside bar where the drink of choice plays therapist. Rachele sports a voice that can peel paint, grabbing one with the modern flair of Beach House and the timeless quality of Neko Case. “We Will Meet Again” demands repeat listens that open up to the various themes of the track that Rachele explains in further detail below…
“Loss: a lot of tunes are about loss, and the moments afterward, the living on, after someone you love is lost,” says Rachele about ‘We Will Meet Again.’ “The last few years have been a time of reinvention, giving up on the illusion of permanence. “We will Meet Again” toys with this string of hope that threads through my work.
“The song was penned in my great aunt Nannie’s house, in southwestern Virginia. I was alone and sitting in her front room, in Vinton, a town that’s known for textile mills and auto parts, settled in the valleys of the Blue Ridge mountains. I’d seen the words engraved on a tombstone in the family cemetery, and sat down at my childhood upright Wurlitzer piano to play it out. The physical items in that song are real possessions in my life. I like the spirit that old things carry: the way a pocket watch has some of the varnish worn off from someone’s hand, the way an old sweater is stretched from the person who wore it before, our family ’55 Pontiac Starchief, it all shows up in my work.”
“I listen to a lot of mountain music only because of my mother’s side of the family. When my grandmother passed last year, I’d talked to my friend Johnny about it and when I sent that tape of it to him, we wrote it into the record version we have on April Fool.
I showed him that pocket watch, and a couple old polaroids. He caught a bit of my family spirit in his guitar playing when we went to record it. He’s a native Tennessean, and it broke me up a bit when we were recording, and I had to leave the studio to get myself back together. I’d never had that happen before. But, I hope the song reflects the most important idea, that even when those we love are gone, forgiveness helps us to hope we find them again, perfect and whole, when we all end up back to the mountainside.”
