Sara Rachele’s last album ‘Scorpio Moon’ had a richly layered augmented band sound, but the follow up ‘Scorpio Sun’ which is due out this year has ripped up that design and started afresh with the emphasis on the raw, the personal and the stripped back. It means that there’s nothing between the listener and the song, just the rawness laid out in full view.
There’s no holding back on ‘Terry Richardson‘, a song inspired by moving in two artistic crowds – a hedonistic one in LA in the Eighties and Nineties and a more genuinely creative crowd later on in Paris. It’s a reflection on the abuse of power across the entertainment industry, which has seen Sara Rachele muse about the line between creative genius and toxicity. In the song she queries whether “this is beginning to be funny to you / it must be / watching me score watching me wait and wait / … / there’s no way you care there’s no way there’s any caring in there“.
Speaking of the song Sara Rachele has described what she was aiming to catch, saying “Not every career endures, but the myth does. And I’m interested in what happens then. What’s interesting to me is how far we can push the allure of art, the darkness, the myth of the twisted painter, and the tortured artist. What’s after that? This is about the manipulation of the artistic and mystical ones who wander around us; it’s about trying to remain true to your artistic vision with misogyny abound.
This song is also partly about the male gaze, but also about how easy it is to get swept up in the twister of vanity. It is a little bit about my boyfriend, and it is a little bit about trying to thrive or exist in a male-dominated industry. There is a mystical hierarchy consisting of the flaneur, the wanderer, the troubadour or what have you.
So many lines blur. What is right and wrong, and what is for the sake of the art? What is for the sake of the next high, or recognition? If we lose ourself for the sake of the art or the scene, were we ever really anyone to begin with? The dated and terrifying nature of the world in which we create, directly impacted this album. Just getting in and out of my own life, I see horrifying behaviour which is often romanticized or glorified (and normalized) in the metropolis. It is the smog around us we breathe. I’m definitely guilty of participating in it – riding along beside it, driving it and saying nothing while the car fills with smoke – but this song is my attempt to crack the window.“
Painfully direct and with no easy out to a happy ending, it’s a song that once heard stays with you.
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