Shooting Star

There's a kind of magic in the phenomena of stepping outdoors into the nighttime and gazing up at the milky black expanse. If you wait a while, the void fills in with pinpricks of light and, if you're attentive or just plain lucky-you're rewarded with the sight of the elusive meteor. That experience works as a tidy metaphor for the creative process that formed Shooting Star, the newest record from Philadelphia's Golden Apples, a prolific group of musicians formed and heralded by singer and songwriter Russell Edling.Following the "rich jangle and big, well-developed songs" (Bandcamp) of 2023's Bananasugarfire, Edling sought to deconstruct his creative process by centering collaboration instead of a more solitary pursuit in songwriting, even as personal matters made isolation a more natural instinct. He describes taking time to make notes of the ways, timing and forms in which songs came to him in the process of demoing the record, and regularly questioning if his approach was like that of "watching a pot of water boil" or waiting for a bolt of light to appear in the sky. In many ways, Shooting Star is an appeal to the muse, a record of "songs about writing songs" born from Edling's desire to trust his instincts despite the posturings of inner demons and creative roadblocks, and to celebrate the little wins along the way. The result is a sprawling new work packed to the brim with playful eccentricities and dynamism, one that owes as much of it's inspiration to mid-century folkies like Michael Hurley and Karen Dalton as it does to alt rock of the nineties like Yo La Tengo and Stereolab. Shooting Star is a constellation of influences, experiences, reckonings-with the state of the world, with others, with creativity, with oneself-with no two songs created in the same way. Instead of holing up in a recording studio, the creation of the record was formed by a patchwork of collaborations in a variety of recording locales, all which were later alchemized by mix engineer Matthew SchimelfenigAnxiety and isolation go hand in hand with connection and elation on Shooting Star, each sentiment harmonized by dreamy mellotron and static haze or raucous spurs of scrubby guitars and doubled vocals. Across the record's twelve songs, Edling wrestles with the human experience with an almost holistic touch, with lyrics that feel both deeply considered and sometimes wonderfully offhand. On "Mind" the persistent, outwardly sunny ode to chugging through life as the world burns à la The Kooks, Edling wrestles with the emotional dissonance of Western life in a time of global upheaval, singing "if this love is an event in my mind, and all this evil is an event in my mind, I must be out of mind." The record further unfurls with the muscular, shimmery "Noonday Demon," a track that gets it's title from a book s