Attachment Figure by Sarah Morrison

Intangible concepts such as love and beauty control so many aspects of our values, and our inability to concretely see these things has frustrated people since the beginning of time. With her subtly revolutionary songwriting, Florida singer-songwriter Sarah Morrison explores this frustration on her new record Attachment Figure. Somewhat operating within the vocal pop tradition of Weyes Blood, Morrison writes songs as extended poems with few choruses or hooks, assigning a set of unique musical motifs to each stanza to give her songs the feeling of slowly drifting from one thought to another. Within each verse, Morrison and her backing band construct miniature emotional swells, stitching these moments together with these turnarounds that defy standard times and keys. Through her lyrics, Morrison airs out her grievances with life in the Florida panhandle, bemoaning the ever-growing local cultural consensus around an extremely specific and rigid moral code, calling into question how any of us could acquire such certainty of intangible concepts as to use them to condemn others. Morrison doesn’t claim to leave Plato’s cave, and she casts a shadow of doubt upon anyone who tells stories about the outside world of love, beauty, and justice. -Michael