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See Night – Just Another Life LP
Los Angeles-based See Night’s new indie-rock album Just Another Life (out Feb. 28) is a shoegaze / dreampop / psych reflection on the lives we lead and ultimately leave behind to start fresh. And like that dynamic between its contrasting themes of leaving and homecoming, the tracklist itself is an ebb and flow—from the garage-rock fuzzy guitar opener, through two piano instrumentals, to the romantic orchestral shoegaze of “Sober & High,” and finally to the lo-fi acoustic outro song. It’s a moody meditation on ever-changing relationships and life chapters. It’s a treatise on a wanderlust that was stifled during the pandemic lockdown and the driving urge to be a touring musician.
See Night is the project of guitarist and singer-songwriter Linda Sao, who tours with an incredible band (drummer Cory Aboud, guitarist Patrick Andrews, and bassist AJ Marquez) known for an explosive live show, and also solo in the U.S., EU and UK. See Night has shared stages with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Widowspeak, Matthew Logan Vasquez (Delta Spirit), Lady Lamb, John Vanderslice, Rogue Wave, The Pack a.d., Sunwatchers, David Dondero and more. The 7-inch single “Eloquence” was personally handpicked by Pavement’s Bob Nastanovich and put out on his Brokers Tip Records. Sao is also an official Anderson Guitarworks artist alongside James Iha, Hannah Wicklund and Graham Nash.
The majority of the new songs were recorded over three days with co-producer Tres Sasser in his Tresland studio in Nashville with Joe Costa (Ben Folds, Elizabeth Cook, Lyle Lovett, Sara Bareilles) engineering and mixing, with an additional session at The Bomb Shelter (Alabama Shakes) in Nashville with Jack Tellman engineering and drummer Aboud. Sasser brought in a stellar collection of musicians to realize Sao’s vision, including drummer Brad Pemberton (Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle and The Dukes), Grammy and Juno award-winning violinist Tania Elizabeth (The Avett Brothers, Mary Gauthier, The Duhks), and guitarist Chris Tench (Liam Lynch, The Sifl and Olly Show, Matthew Ryan). The album was mastered by Brian Lucey (David Lynch, The Black Keys, Ghost, Cage the Elephant), who’s worked on multiple Grammy-winning albums and singles.
“Tres and Joe have become my go-to studio team of incredibly talented friends,” says Sao. “They’ve both worked on the previous See Night releases. And just like with my bandmates, I have to feel emotionally safe with the people I work with because both recording in a studio and performing live onstage are incredibly vulnerable things. I want good people to infuse good energy into what I consider personal heart songs.”
The album kicks off with the driving indie-rock “Being Good Is Supposed To Be Easy,” about the passing of Sao’s father. Its foreboding shoegaze instrumentation is energized by big, layered distorted guitars, a hooky melodic bassline, and propulsively dynamic drums. Everything drops out in the verse to emphasize Sao’s ethereal vocals. They have a solemn air as she lyrically tackles universal themes of reconciling with death, adult struggles with one’s parents, and the simple desire to be a good person. It’s a song of generational trauma, of timeless debts that can’t be repaid, and wanting to be the person that breaks that cycle.
Relationship love song “LA Traffic” and the title-track “Just Another Life” both reference driving, and would be great during long car rides. The simplicity of the distorted guitars of “LA Traffic” weigh heavily on Sao’s visually poetic lyrics of driving in the slow lane on a Los Angeles highway. It’s also an overt nod to her new home of Los Angeles and of her new life there. She takes this thing, LA traffic, that everyone hates, and turns the tables with a different perspective. She wants more of it. She’s in a car, on a pre-dawn morning, with someone that she may not see again. Is this moment the last time they’ll enjoy each other’s presence? “Not even the sun knew we were done,” she sings as she embraces the end of things and yearns for more time together.
The poppy indie-rock title track “Just Another Life,” also about leaving old lives behind to start new ones, was written in the throes of pandemic isolation. Sao was planning to return to tour the EU when the pandemic hit, and those dreams were suddenly halted. It’s a song that begins with a catchy, astral, nearly new wave hook, before building into a massive, pounding bridge that feels like time travel. There’s a loneliness to this song’s sense of nostalgia, even as it looks toward the future. Now she’s been back on the road, taking this song on tour.
“I was a solo traveler even before I played music publicly,” says Sao. “That was fate training me to be a DIY touring musician. My happy place is in the window seat on a train. Traveling is freedom, a way to seek optimism and hope because you never know who or what’s behind a door. Monotony gets me down. Touring has been my cure.”
The mournful and atmospheric “Gravity” is a shoegazy ballad about letting go, moving on from the past while being called into the future. Its sad dreampop composition is carried forward by finger-picked electric guitar, reverb and drums with a heartbeat cadence. The bass and otherworldly guitars move in the background like a wistful fog. “The gravity of tomorrow / Pulls yesterday to sleep / But you were immovable like a chess piece,” she sings. It’s a song about the comparing mind and a painful longing that resolves with newfound clarity.
The hopeful and romantic “Sober & High” embraces that feeling of love’s earliest days, when there’s nothing else in this world except for you and that other person—a feeling so intense that you feel high even when sober. It’s a sonic love spell that Sao casts through gentle labyrinthine guitars, Tania Elizabeth’s celestial violin, and with just the right amount of sparseness left for her vocals to bewitch you. There’s also a warning intertwined here, of not letting your mind spiral or allowing self sabotage to seep in, as she sings, “Say no more, I know more than enough / To go forward, not backward down into my mind.”
Most of the album was written during Sao’s pandemic isolation in San Francisco and were intentional homecomings to her core singer-songwriter styles. Perhaps the sense of homecoming is most embodied by her instrumental cinematic pieces “Piano No. 1 (Morning)” and “Piano No. 2 (Night),” titled to pay homage to Chopin’s “Prelude Op. 28, No. 15”—the last song she studied on piano as a teen. Both songs were improvised in the studio and turned into segues, gluing the album together. “Piano No. 1 (Morning)” has a light, veil-like feel to it, like the sun cutting through a romantic grey fog rolling in from the San Francisco Bay. While “Piano No. 2 (Night)” bookends the album with drum heartbeats and stacked violins that move like stormy waves in the witching hour.
We finish the album with her alone on her bed recording the solo acoustic “NYC Coats” as an iPhone memo. A raw and quiet resolution to the 8-track journey. It’s an acoustic lo-fi bedroom indie-folk song about waking up in the morning anticipating a farewell to someone leaving for tour. It captures a vividly filmic moment of a goodbye that’s naturally expected and accepted by both people, but of not wanting to leave their heavy embrace. Along with “LA Traffic,” it comes back to the subject of ephemeral love as a touring musician.
“I heard that first, casual iPhone recording and I knew that this was it, that this was the take,” says Sao. “Simple and foundationally singer-songwriter, flaws and all. No break or bridge. No reverb or vocal mic. It’s a poem. I wrote it right after playing in Brooklyn for the first time, and so a NYC winter was on my mind.”
Just Another Life is a calculated album that should be listened to as a whole. It’s intentional. It’s orchestrated. The songs connect with each other in a visceral way. From the big rock guitars of “Being Good Is Supposed To Be Easy,” to the dreamy enchantment of ”LA Traffic,” “Gravity” and “Sober & High,” to the cinematic piano interstitials, to the delicately intimate bedroom recording of “NYC Coats,” the themes of love, loss and moving on to a new life shine through. Close your eyes and allow this album’s sonic representations of human emotions to wash over you—to move you with the cyclical universality of metaphorical death and rebirth.
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Sao is a Vietnamese-American whose parents met during the Vietnam War. The band name pays homage to her family history and, specifically, to the Sea Knight helicopter her father flew during the war as a U.S. Navy pilot. Her father passed away last year, and this album connects directly to him.
In 2024 Sao participated in a music and book tour alongside author Christian Vo in support of Vo’s intergenerational memoir with her own father, My Vietnam, Your Vietnam. Together they shared personal stories, readings and music that reflected their shared family histories and human connections.
Sao studied classical piano from the ages of eight to sixteen. This album comes full circle to her childhood with the piano interludes “Piano No. 1 (Morning)” and “Piano No. 2 (Night).” It’s another way that she “goes home” to her family and adolescence. You can feel the excitement and pride in these songs. “These two songs are a way to connect with my parents, their influence and the sound of my house as a child,” Sao says. “It’s a way to connect with my core self from long before the idea of performing onstage, or for other people, was ever a thing.”
Sao was always a writer and poet, but she fell in love with the acoustic guitar when she was 18. Her early twenties were spent discovering and honing her craft as a solo acoustic singer-songwriter who played a few times a year. She eventually picked up an electric guitar and moved to San Francisco with the intention of starting an indie-rock band and formed See Night. See Night now tours in the U.S. and Sao has toured Europe solo every year since 2018 (minus the 2020 pandemic). Drummer Aboud, guitarist Andrews, and bassist Marquez fuel an energetic, emotive live show with their nuanced power and additional songwriting prowess.
Sao moved to Los Angeles in early 2024 to be closer to family, and continues to tour. “Similar to the aliveness I get from touring,” says Sao, “moving to L.A. has felt like a new adventure unto itself. I’m walking around with a wide-eyed sense of exploration. As a musician new to this big, intimidating city full of talent, I’m both incredibly nervous and exhilarated. It’s recharging me with both self-doubt and inspiration.”
The band’s debut EP Where Are You (2014) was recorded in three days in Oakland. “Chasm” carries the heaviness of classic heartbreak with indie-rock guitars and orchestral flourishes. “Banking on Things” utilizes lyrical imagery like “a gun ready to speak,” but the metaphor is Sao craving a new life to begin, with songs inside ready to take flight. It’s a collection of songs that uses a longing for love as a metaphor for wanting to play live music and tour. It’s about yearning for a future that Sao has since manifested.
The melancholy shoegaze of the EP You Are Us (2018) established See Night as a live band to reckon with. They started touring the West Coast culminating in an epic album release show at the legendary Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco (where they’ve had every album release show). It’s an album that toys with gritty near-instrumentals, to post-rock ballads, to the dreampop of “Eloquence,” which was rereleased as the title track of the 7-inch on Bob Nastanovich of Pavement’s Brokers Tip Records.
“I had just gotten back from playing NYC a month before the pandemic hit,” says Sao. “My friend Daniel had a last-minute extra ticket to a screening of the Pavement documentary Pavement: Slow Century at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater where Bob did an in-person Q&A after the film. After the event, we went to the bar next door for a night cap. Bob randomly walked in and my friend, after fanning out, introduced us. I asked Bob the name of his nonprofit label he’d mentioned during the Q&A and he invited me to send him my band’s music. Of course, I didn’t think he was serious at all and figured he was just being nice. But I sent it to him that night, and the next day he wanted to do the 7-inch. I’m so thankful, not only for that vinyl release, but what’s most surprising has been his continued genuine kindness and support ever since.”
Just Another Life was mostly written during the pandemic in San Francisco in isolation, with the exceptions of “Gravity” (written during her solo acoustic days, then resurrected and reimagined in the studio), and “LA Traffic” and “Being Good Is Supposed To Be Easy” were written in 2024 after her move to Los Angeles. “Inherently there was no band practice during the pandemic,” says Sao. “I felt myself going back to a more lyrical place. These are all heart songs. I was also writing on my piano as I revisited my old sheet music I dug up from when I was a kid. I’m writing like a rubberband, expanding and contracting, playing with the dynamic of heavy rock and empty space.”
In Just Another Life, Sao confronts her place in this new life that she’s built for herself, the loss of her father, moments of longing and leaving, and—ultimately—moments of feeling at home with a person or place.
“Throughout the pandemic, all I wanted to do was tour again,” says Sao. “I’ve lived many lives and I’ve now moved to L.A. for family reasons, which was a huge leap…leaving a whole life behind. My father’s passing was another part of my life that was lost, and it marked a new reality. This album feels like I’m stepping into a new light.”
Track list:
1. Being Good Is Supposed To Be Easy
2. LA Traffic
3. Just Another Life
4. Gravity
5. Piano No. 1 (Morning)
6. Sober & High
7. Piano No. 2 (Night)
8. NYC Coats
Album Credits:
All songs written by Linda Sao
Co-producers: Tres Sasser and Linda Sao
Engineer: Jack Tellman (tracks 1 & 2) at The Bomb Shelter in Nashville, TN.
Engineer: Joe Costa (tracks 3-7) at Tresland in Nashville, TN.
“NYC Coats” engineered by Linda Sao on an iPhone voice memo in a San Francisco, CA bedroom.
Mixing: Joe Costa
Mastering: Brian Lucey
Linda Sao: vocals, guitars, piano.
Chris Tench: guitars on tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7.
Brad Pemberton: drums on tracks 3, 4, 6, 7.
Cory Aboud: drums on track 1.
Tres Sasser: bass on tracks 1, 3, 4, 6.
Tania Elizabeth: violin on tracks 5, 6, 7.