El Perro Del Mar

El Perro Del Mar’s sole member is an emotional one. Good thing, then, that Sarah Assbring can place them in their proper context. Hers is a rare mind; built with an appreciation for life’s raw feelings and experiences with the logic to understand the why and how behind it all.

Sarah’s latest, From The Valley To The Stars, waxes and wanes to near perfection, exuding and studying life and loss of life. It’s a “personal extension” of the woman behind the sonic curtain and it made for some fascinating answers to our curious questions.

SSv: What prompted the move from Hybris to Licking Fingers. Did you have relationships at the new label?

El Perro Del Mar: I was in need of some change and fresh air I guess and also I felt the album I was working on needed a different kind of understanding which I knew Licking Fingers had. We’d met here and there throughout the years and I always got such good vibes from them.

SSv: What are they able to provide for you there with this new release?

EPDM: A good basis for me to stand on, mutual understanding and loving support and a lot of dedication.

SSv: It seems that there’s a great mix of both joy and sorrow on the disc. Is that a natural extension of your own feelings or were there purposeful efforts to bring so much emotion to Valley?

EPDM: Well, From the Valley to the Stars is a very personal piece of work which I felt I just had to do. It came out of being caught up in thoughts of life and death and a kind of coming or wanting to come to terms with those thoughts. Like wanting to come to peace with questions that troubled me. That’s why there are so much mixed feelings on it – but I did want to talk about hope and joy, more so than of sorrow since I believe that joy is or can be what awaits you after having really stared grief and pain in the eye. That’s what I believe at least.

SSv: What were some of the questions you were wanting to come to terms with?

EPDM: I guess was preoccupied with thoughts of death and the afterlife. Asking myself if there is something after death and so on. For a long time I was just thinking about death that it suddenly just switched into these thoughts of life and the beauty and ecstasy of life. Maybe I realized there is no afterlife and that that just makes life even more short and precious.

SSv: That place of vulnerability – grief, searching, confusion, pain – has to be hard to write from? Or at least to allow others into that place, I would think. Have you found that to be true or is it therapeutic, to some degree?

EPDM: It was important for me not to sink into the heavy, dark thoughts too much. Instead I really wanted to focus on the hopeful and uplifting things – I wanted to kind of look at the opposites of all the heaviness. Maybe because that’s what I needed for myself – to find a place of comfort and consolation, of goodness and of hope. That’s where the idea of heaven as a theme came in. Heaven stands for all those things – and to me it doesn’t have to be placed within any religious context or anything like that, it’s just a timeless human thing I think. To think of heaven as a place where all is okay, forever and ever.

So working out of that idea I didn’t find it difficult to write the album – I found it a relief and … a necessity. It’s more difficult to allow others into it since its been such a personal yet natural place for me. It’s definitely been therapeutic and like I said necessary for me to do this album and in the way I did it. I think it gave me a means to move on to a different place in my life, too.

SSv: Can you let us into that process of songwriting overall? How does it generally work for you to sit down with a thought or creative spark? Is it a long-gestating thing or does it come easily?

EPDM: It’s usually built up for a while, like in the way that I keep ideas for lyrics in a notebook to let it rest there for some time and then when I go back to it I can immediately see if there is anything there worth working on. Ideas come anywhere at any time but then there’s the disciplinary part where you have to start really working on them, like a sculptor needs to carve out the form out of a piece of stone or clay – and you cannot really tell if it’s worthwhile until you’ve done all the carving. Sometimes I start with the harmonics first, like listening to what a certain piece of rhythm or a simple chord have to tell me. The first step to writing a song works pretty easily – it’s very intuitive I feel. It’s the rest of the work – the part where the brain needs to be involved along with the heart that can be tougher.

SSv: You took a trip to India in the midst of recording. Did that affect the album at all?

EPDM: It affected me in the way that I really needed to have a break from the intense work in the studio. I didn’t realize it at the time and was kind of forced to interrupt the work when I went there but it didn’t take me long to realize it was for the better. And the trip absolutely gave me a different outlook on a lot of things which I no doubt brought with me when finishing the work on the album.

SSv: Can you give us a tangible example of the trip changing your perspective?

EPDM: Well, India kind of does things to you, all your senses are open wide and you’re not able to turn them off once they’re open. So all the beauty and wonder hits you in the same way that all the horror and ugliness does – and all at the same time. You’re unshielded kind of. And I enjoyed that feeling – it made me feel like I learned more in just one day than I do in one year. In that sense it changed my perspective pretty much in general. And for the album, its theme is about life and death and about being able to grasp the facts of life and death and I found that in India you don’t run away from those facts – in the way I feel we do in the Western world. Instead you stare them in the eye. Religiously, ritually and on an everyday basis.

SSv: The organ is so prevalent through Valley – is that a sound you fell in love with? Is it meant to tie the songs together?

EPDM: Definitely. The organ is the key instrument and the key to the inspiration of the album I think. To me the organ functioned as the perfect reaction against the acoustic guitar and I really needed to feel like I did something differently in that I went about writing the songs differently than to the previous album – the previous album was mostly written on the guitar. There is also something deeply soothing about the organ especially when in the process of songwriting. It speaks to you like a friend and I guess I liked being around it as much as I possibly could.

SSv: In your blog, you end up writing every now and then about spirituality or a cosmic search of some sort. Does that journey affect your artistry at all?

EPDM: Absolutely, the cosmic search is what is the very key to the album. It’s what got me started and it’s what got me to finish it. And I guess in the long run it’s what keeps me going.