Erica Buettner - The Book of Waves (2018)

I wanted this song to start with a more minimal folky vibe but then open up into something fuller, inspired by a late 60s sound and the beautiful layers of Pierre Faa’s arrangement. “Sea Green Eyes” encapsulates the ambiance of living in Lisbon, a sense of sunny-day melancholy, a feeling of foreboding when you’re surrounded by beauty… It’s also the feeling that things are going wrong, but slowly and in a way that’s difficult to understand or stop. As in the kind of relationship that is alluring but ultimately unfulfilling and potentially even quite harmful. I love to play with nuances and double meanings, so it can be interpreted as a song with an ecological theme, where the “we” is not two people, but rather us as a species. “The Book Of Waves” often deals with our participation, active or passive, in an exploitative society. But I don’t want to be didactic about this. I just want to honestly lean into this vulnerable space and inhabit it over the course of 11 tracks of storytelling and reflection.