Close your eyes. Breathe in through the nose. Hold. Breathe out through the mouth. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. The sensation you’re feeling? It’s a lifetime’s worth of stress, accumulated in mere months, exiting the body. We collect it the way shelves do dust, with it gradually coating the books and knickknacks until we can barely distinguish one from the next.
On the one hand, I could say that Colorado-based singer-songwriter Sarah Banker’s four-track EP, Into the Heart, is akin to a sonic massage, with her lilting songs kneading any and all tension from the soul. On the other, I could write that it’s a meditative soundtrack that ushers the mind into a peaceful, easy state. It’s gentle and sweet, bubbly and seductive, peaceful and calming, the kind of collection that works well morning, noon and night.
The set opens with the breezy “Friends,” which finds her declaring her attraction to another; in another era, aka the mid-1970s, it would’ve shared radio space with selections from Carole King, Melissa Manchester and Carly Simon. “Into the Heart,” too, conjures that long-ago time, when matters of the heart and soul were at the forefront of public thought. In it, she reflects on the importance of doing what you gotta do to survive life’s storms; good times are coming, it’s just a matter of when—not if—the dark clouds give way to the sun. The upbeat “Our Love,” for its part, preaches love—in the grandest sense of the word—as a way to live life, while “Cockadoodledoo” also encourages us to step into and embrace the light.
In short, Into the Heart is a wonderful set; hopefully it’s the first step towards an album in full. What the world needs now is love, sweet love—and an artful advocate for it. I recommend not just this EP, which is out this Friday, but her Tedx talk from a few years back; it includes lessons drawn from her life as well as several of the EP’s songs.
The Old Grey Cat 
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