Atmospheric dream-pop quartet Billie Gale is a musical monument to songwriter Beth Garber’s late mother. Billie Gale—the woman—was a classic feminist, a combination of soft and strong, and the band that bears her name shares this intense duality. The band’s enveloping shoegaze textures blanket singer, and primary songwriter, Beth’s boldly vulnerable lyrical outcries. On September 20th the band will release its debut album, Imprint.
The band explores beauty borne out of devastating loss. Beth’s songs are literate, introspective, viscerally expressive, and impressionistic, often evoking the rainy-day environs of her native Pacific Northwest. Beth favors clever use of language, intriguing rhyme schemes, and honesty in her writing. She’s influenced by a broad array of artists and writers, including Joni Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor, David Bazan (Pedro The Lion), Aesop Rock, and Death Cab for Cutie, among others.
The album documents the mourning and healing processes Beth underwent after her mother’s sudden death in 2013—even the title is packed with elegiac overtones. Here, Beth is referencing the phenomenon in nature when baby birds imprint the site of their mother, and that visual penetration begins the nature of their connection.
Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive early listen of Imprint. With songs soaked in warm reverband textured with layers of jeweled counter melodies, the album is arranged with peaks and valleys dynamics to release pent-up emotions. This is a reflection of the headspace Beth Garber was in as she began the process of writing and then recording the songs. Throughout the album, we sparkling guitarwork and dimensional textures, durable and counter melodic basslines, and expressively intuitive percussion and drums. The collection of musicians come together to build a potent and emotionally resonant piece of music that is simultaneously rocking and introspective. Garber doesn’t shy away from the more difficult feelings, which in turn manifest in a more universal sense to make the lyrics something we can all identify with. With dream-pop as a sort of guiding sound, the band delves into a diverse territory of styles and sounds, veering from slow-burn anthems to dreamy vocals, chiming new-wave guitars, and soft-to-explosive dynamics in the span of a song. At other points they dive into sublime shoegaze and gritty indie-rock, making for a truly exciting and invigorating listen.
Beth Garber offers her own perspective on the process and inspiration behind the record:
“Our debut album ‘Imprint’ has so much to do with time. The catalyst for much of the writing on this record was the sudden loss of my mom, and our namesake Billie Gail Garber. In the song ‘You Should Be Here’, the verse reads ‘another disaster has taken our home, and I cannot find the foundation, or tell it from any other stone.’ A constant companion had been deleted from my future. In an instant, the way I’d pictured time passing had to change. It was as if a long phone conversation had been cut short, and I was to keep talking into open air with no response or answer to my continuous questions. In the song ‘Where Are You Now,’ off the record, I deal mostly with this feeling of talking into space, sensing that the person lost still exists somewhere unreachable .
In grief, my greatest fear was that I would forget her over time. It’s like I was suddenly responsible for her legacy. As ‘You Should Be Here’ continues into the chorus, I say ‘You should be famous, resting on a hill, and I’d cast your image, had I the skill.’ Knowing perfectly well that my imperfect memory wouldn’t be enough to convey all the most important aspects of this person I admired and wanted to be like all my life.
But as I continued to write the album, my grief transformed into something sweeter. I started to notice aspects of myself change into the image of my mom, the way people joke about. I think I noticed it first in my hands. She had these strong, yet feminine hands. One day I realized my hands look like hers. My laugh is like hers. Even her road rage that was such an embarrassment to me started to show up when I least expected.
This is the ‘Imprint,’ the lasting impression that continues to develop and emerge over time, which changed the fear of time passing into something like excitement, I guess hope is a better word. There was still a connection, an ongoing conversation with the loved one lost.
Apart from the content of the record, the writing of it just took a lot of time. This was our coming of age as a band, and we labored over the details. Some artists can put out a single every month, and there are so many voices out there, it seems like the only way to be heard is to produce an extreme amount of content at an inhuman rate. This album is just very human. It’s sweet and sad, nurturing and unruly. We’ve put our whole selves into it, so that, in the listening we also make an impression that is lasting and emergent, or at least that’s the hope.
LISTEN:
Imprint is out September 20th. For more music and info visit www.billiegale.com.
