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It’s tempting to describe Molly Parden’s stunning new album as “dreamy.” Sacramented is reflective, romantic, full of longing; it is suffused with the light of late evening and indeed references dreams in nearly one third of this body of work. The soundscapes, melodies, lyrics, chord movements, and especially Parden’s vocal performances work together to create at times a dreamlike atmosphere. Synthesizers and abstracted guitars glide around frozen reverbs, a piano bench creaks beneath the whisper of a vintage microphone hiss. Strings and woodwinds weave themselves midair into fluttering arpeggios. Old longings awaken: “Take me to that faraway look in your eyes,” Parden sings in the opening track “Wash Me In Rosemary”. Two songs later in “I See Right Now”, she confesses, “I had to give your letters back / Baby they were just too good to have.”

Rendering these moments and memories in song so tenderly is remarkable in its own right. It takes immense artistry and inspiration to truthfully capture and coherently portray one’s private thoughts and experiences. Further still to make it all appear so effortless. Most artists rest satisfied having wrestled their interiority into tangible form. But dreams and memories, however beautiful, however painful, are still just dreams and memories. [Or perhaps: they aren’t just dreams and memories.] They desire our interpretation and cry out for significance. They yearn for resolution and acceptance.

Molly Parden has done what might be called the “inner work.” She has fought with her heartaches, the images that persist and haunt, for meaning. She has gone through experience into wisdom and truth, and she continues to do this work before our very ears, openly and invitingly. After years of steeping in the work of Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, she pays homage to his light and tenderness on the existential-leaning track 4, “Where Do All Of Our Passing Days Go?,” an adaptation of O’Donohue’s beautiful pondering about the passing of time, the meeting place of memories. In this song, we encounter someone “Looking for love in the wrong spots / Thinking about the wrong thoughts.” Amid a skittering and dragging rhythm section, lazily strummed acoustic guitars steeped in melancholy, Parden wonders “What do I do with the memories?” Buoyed by chiming vibraphones and single shivering notes from an electric guitar, Parden puts forth a fascinating resolveto a seemingly terrifying quandary: “Maybe I'll never find someone / Maybe my love is just mine.” She takes loneliness to task with one of the sharpest weapons against it: gratitude. She offers a brief litany of things that solitude affords her. “No trouble reaching the top shelf / Going to shows by my own self / Open the blinds in the morning / Just some of the things I'm enjoying.” It’s ultimately not so important whether this is a statement of evidence that has brought her to a new place of understanding and acceptance, or is an aspirational rehearsal of something she wants to make true by singing it into existence. Like a psalm, it is probably both. She has earned our trust either way and convinces us when she reaches the end: “I'm not afraid of being lonely like I used to be.”

Much more than a dream, Sacramented recalls one of those rare, special conversations with what the Celtic call an anam cara or “soul friend.” It’s one of those afternoon conversations so deep and intimate that you’ve lost track of time in shared confessions, celebrations, advice, laughter, tears. You’ve suddenly found yourselves in a twilit room, each other’s presence deeply felt in a revelatory afterglow. It’s what one might call communion.

The production on Sacramented does a lot of work to help create this atmosphere. It’s packed with intricate instrumentation while still holding space for the listener to move about in, as if we’re allowed the chance to walk around the room and pick up significant objects, holding them up to the slanted light. Woodwind flourishes, muted brass wanderings, fleeting stacks of background harmonies, mellow vibraphones, old drum machines all combine toward a common end. The bright chime of tambourine and glockenspiel keep us afloat in the dimly lit chamber of the title track, “Sacramented.” As the rhythm section pushes us onward, we hear metallic scrapes across electric guitars and fuzzed out lead lines buzzing around Parden’s pure voice, which sits pristinely at the center of it all.

Hearing Molly Parden live is always a special experience—yes, her voice does sound that good in person—but Sacramented offers a deep listening experience that rewards repeated listens and high quality headphones. Richly textured and beautifully wrought, the record undoubtedly represents the best music she’s released yet. It’s an outward sign of an invisible grace.

-Jamie Dougherty

Autumn is an auspicious season for nostalgia, and Molly Parden’s new album Sacramented opens with late year sunshine and an invitation to reverie: Wash me in rosemary / You come to me when I sleep / For the last 200 nights / I’ve seen you in every one of my dreams. Across the work, Molly pulls close the memory of love and love lost, but she sings like someone who has made peace with both. If her Rosemary EP (2020) was a tribute to grief in the undertow, Sacramented sees her out past those tumbling breakers, floating on her back.  

Molly’s voice is immaculate, as is the production arc of the record, thanks to her producer and mix engineer, Micah Tawlks. The core team of musicians –Tawlks, Dan Burns, and Kevin Dailey– are some of her closest friends in Nashville, in addition to longtime comrades and collaborators Juan Solorzano, Jason Goforth and Ben Kaufman (distinctly heard throughout Rosemary) each making guest appearances, making it feel like another Tuesday night in the small eclectic music town they have inhabited together for the last decade. Their arrangements are generous and unhurried and perhaps constitute a memorial to the end of an era for Parden, her having recently relocated to western Massachusetts.  

On Sacramented, Molly holds emotional tension like a master weaver. In “Dandy Blend” she juxtaposes the devastating past with the simple, human present: Thought that I would never get over him / Put a little honey in my Dandy Blend. Adding honey, she seems to be making the best of her days. Maybe things aren’t fully settled, but that’s okay—and she’s okay. The world and thoughts that Molly paints become so immediate that the 60’s era piano, tambourine and flute interlude make more sense than anything. (Dandy Blend, don’t sleep on this song.) 
 

After the first couple songs, the tethering to Rosemary loosens and finds us in both lighter and darker parts of the woods. She manages to pay homage to an ended love in “I See Right Now” through syncopated guitar and bass lines over woodwinds and a backbeat, singing: I’ll find the strength to sing it to you one day / I see right now I’ve always wanted to be with you / And I see all that I’ve always wanted here is you. “Algorithm” with its unresolved arpeggiating lets you know that the haunting is well underway, with its time-melting slowdowns. But in the title track, “Sacramented”, Molly’s unrequited love is en voce alto, singing her way from Careful, the secret / Do you trust me? / Song of the sacred / Can you love me? to an anguished refrain of There are those that I love / And then there's you / The one who I want / Only one that I want / Is you, you, you… In her own words on the song: “When I listen to this song, I see Trinity walking up a steep street in Seattle on a rainy day wearing her long trench coat with jet black wet hair, hungry for Neo.”  

To the initiated, it is an open secret that no one harmonizes like Molly. And thankfully, on the back of forlornity, we get her in stacks. As she closes out the soft pleading in “Cigarette”,  I miss you and I wanna go back, her voice pulls open a blanket of somber tight harmony for us to rest on with her sorrowful exhales… back… back… 

The song “The Weakest Link” finds Parden exploring a different theme through the lens of childhood. The world seen through these eyes is one where much is expected of someone so small. Molly seems to implore the ghosts of parents past to show her how to be in the world, and wonders, Will I get the chance to see / Black and white turn to green? This musing leans effortlessly into the great look-back of the album in “Maybe It Will Stay, Maybe It Will Grow” 

I can feel I’m letting go / Move from shade to shine / When I leave, the green it grows / The roof bursts into life 

On the opening track of Rosemary, Molly sang I can see you wanting to let go, and this time she’s the one who’s ready. Through the storytelling of this record, we get a glimpse of hope after the pain, told with a graciousness that can only come from someone who has learned to live after heartbreak. Something no one would wish on dear Molly, but then we’d never have the gift of this album.  

 The 10-song album comes to a close with a callback. Molly re-recorded “These Are the Times”, the final track from Rosemary, but this time with the wistfulness of the Vince Guaraldi Trio. A self-proclaimed nod to Chet Baker, the new recording is complete with a muted trumpet solo, feathery piano chording, and sweeping brushes. This version offers us a parting gift of nostalgia, but with perhaps equal doses of its sadness and its romantic charm. Molly has given us a new album in perfect season. She proves herself yet again as a songwriter’s songwriter—so intentional in her craft, and so gracious in heartache. 

 -Zach Winters