The Still Tide - Between Skies (2020)

The playful video for “Keep It,” the lead single off The Still Tide’s latest EP Between Skies is a light-hearted, hipster montage that almost looks too fun, considering that the song is about a relationship running its course and the aftermath of the split. The video, which comes across like one of those memes that says “what your mom thinks you do,” features Still Tide frontwoman Anna Morsett smiling and laughing throughout and culminates with her dancing and playing guitar on the top of a mid-80s Porsche in the middle of a graffitied alley.

That dichotomy between smiling while singing about relationships gone south is one that Morsett and The Still Tide present over and over again on the EP, her first for mod y vi Records. Both magnetic frontwoman and self-described introspective loner, Morsett is often caught somewhere between facing outward and turning inward. This duality is a crucial piece of the aptly named Between Skies, which she produced with long-time collaborator Joe Richmond. Equal parts love and loss, opportunity and closed doors, the album creates a fitting foundation for the peaks and troughs of what it means to be human. Soaring synths, fragile guitars and driving bass provide the canvas for an artist breaking in a new brush and serves as territory for Morsett’s interior and exterior lives to merge. “I love the quiet world of songwriting, the intimate place these songs spring from in my private life, but I also really love to move and dance. In many ways this EP is an attempt to bridge those two worlds; to retain the tenderness while also making us sway,” she said.

While Morsett’s project has gone through several iterations, the one constant has always been her honest, intentional and luminous brand of indie rock. Influenced as much by growing up in the Pacific Northwest as by her experiences traveling the globe as a guitar tech for artists such as The Tallest Man on Earth and Kaki King, The Still Tide is Morsett’s true and heartfelt landing place for her confessional lyrics and intricate guitar work.

With the use of alternate tunings, uncommon capos and a sea of reverb as the signature underpinning for her dynamic voice, Morsett has carved out a space that seems as much for herself as it is for her listeners. “Writing and playing music has always made me feel like I belonged to something other, something beyond myself. It always had the answer before I could think of the question and settled me in the world, made sense of it, of myself. I feel like I’m still making music for my own heart just as much as I am for the hearts of others, hoping they might be carried by it as much as I’ve been.”

She continued, “Some of these songs seem to lyrically push and pull towards one another. There are delicate threads strung between these songs and around themes of perspective: what we carry, how we carry and see ourselves and how all of it affects us and our ability to love.”