Awakening Under Fluorescent Lights

Where do you go when you are lonely? In the construct of our current world amidst the concrete and schedules of our everyday life, it is not always easy to shroud yourself for hours in a dark green wood when you need to get away. Rather you use what's available. For some it might be the laundry room, or the deserted hallway on the bottom floor of their apartment building. For Mindy Dillard, it is the supermarket. There is so much light there! (Though it is fluorescent) And life! (Grocery checker-outers are usually alive, even if they are mean.) (Plus organic sections are very lively.) There is so much nourishment. (Though much of it is filled with sodium.) ~~~ This is Portland-based performance artist Mindy Dillard's debut album! Through her lyrical soprano and her black Martin travel guitar she's turned everyday objects like cake, candles, bed sheets and red trucks into mythical symbols. Her songs sparkle with life: - Supermarket Sojourn is an acoustic journey that sounds like it's from the middle of a grocery store musical. It explores the supermarket as a place or refuge and transformation. She and friends have also created a music video for this track, viewable below. - In Patterned Leaves, she uses a pattern on bedsheets as a stream-of-consciousness entry into the ending of a relationship, and as a witness to her own maturation. - Young Lovers in Red Trucks is an observatory musing on patterns of love, born from watching teenagers undergoing the infatuation stage in and around a red truck through the window in her living room. ~~~ This album is rich with unusual finger-picking patterns and conversational narrative. Her collage-like songs are dripping with evocative images of everyday and spiked with sequences from her bizarre and fantastical imagination. The songs sound as if they are part of a larger story. Mindy's voice is strong and her energy is dynamic from ethereal to jazzy to sounding like a comedic song from an ingenue in a musical. The instrumentation on this album includes electric guitar, lap steel, bass, cello, mandolin, and backup vocals from her favorite meat-slinging maidens. Mindy co-produced the album at Medicine Whistle Studios in Portland, Oregon with sound engineer Dan Rhiger.