Bird or Snake, the sophomore set from Chicago-based avant-folk singer, songwriter and sometimes flautist Emma Hospelhorn, aka Em Spel, is a compelling collection that, if played once, is sure to be played twice, thrice and plenty more after that. In some respects, it’s akin to an audio rendition of an oil painting that mixes and matches impressionistic, surrealistic and realistic elements with the bristly brushstrokes of the abstract, as reliant on fantasy and myth as it is on shifting perceptions. “I started writing many of these songs in 2022, during a residency with the Eastern Frontier Foundation on Norton Island,” she explains in the press release. “After recovering from a serious illness in 2024, I came back to these songs, and I found that their meanings had changed for me; they became more about life cycles, large and small, and maybe more about life as something strange and glorious, that exists in counterpoint to death.”
As the poet Linda Gregg (1942-2019) observes in “The Singers Change, the Music Goes On”:
No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, births and goneness.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir.
Otherwise Eurydice would be forever
in the dark. Our singing brings her
back. Our dying keeps her alive.
The nine-track album opens with “The Poet,” which finds an unnamed wordsmith confiding, “Nobody told me life would be so long/an hour is like a year…” and that she’s “falling out of time.” That’s growing old in a nutshell, really. Time stretches into a paper-thin trampoline that’s as likely to break beneath our weight as it is to bounce us into a higher realm. All the while, a subtle collaboration of instruments laps along the melody like waves on the shore, pushing inland one moment before receding the next. The same’s true of the title track, which explores the inherent possibilities—good and bad—that the unknown presents. “The future is like a strange egg you found on the ground,” she says in the release. “You don’t know what is going to be born.”
“Sea Wall” finds her delving into the yin-yang relationship of a retaining wall and the veritable ocean; it’s a moody ode that explores, I think, how outside forces shape us and, to an extent, give us meaning. “Geographic” turns to autotune to stretch and compress Hospelhorn’s vocals, with the rubbery result replicating the realities of modern digital life. “This is a song,” she says, “for everyone who is constantly bombarded by ads, by algorithms, by a million screens vying for your attention.”
“Paul” is another jazzy tune that’s replete with syncopated beats, off-kilter vocals and lyrics about a friend who left too soon. “Mourning Time,” which follows, delves into the stages of grief; it flowers into a dramatic dispatch that scrapes against the dark clouds in an otherwise blue sky. “The Tide” returns to the “Sea Wall” theme, with Hospelhorn this time singing from the perspective of the ocean, which both predates and is sure to outlast any and all retaining walls.
“Fruiting Body,” which features bird songs she recorded in Maine, finds Hospelhorn on a road trip that’s not about the destination but the ride—it’s about enjoying the now, in other words, something too many of us forsake while fretting about the future. “The Night” closes the album on a longing note, with a flute floating through the genteel arrangement.
Hospelhorn wrote the songs and produced them herself, with additional production by Brian Deck (Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse, Counting Crows). She plays flutes, guitars, electronics, keyboards, and vocals, while Mabel Kwan (synths), Eric Ridder (drums and percussion), Katie Ernst (bass), Dustin Laurenzi (saxophone), Sam Wagster (pedal steel) and Deck (drums and electronics) provide backing. In a weird way, Bird or Snake reminds me somewhat of Suzanne Vega’s departure from straight folk on 99.9F°, but where Vega embraced electronica, Hospelhorn leans on jazz and even indie rock. I’ve never not listened to it once and not played it again. It’s a remarkable outing. Highly recommended.
The Old Grey Cat 