Sandra Bouza - A Sound in the Dark (2023)

A lot of this album was inspired during an artist residency at Halls Island. The title track was inspired by a funny but significant story, when I went down to the water, late on a beautiful clear night, to go skinnydipping, and got scared by a sound in the dark and jumped out of the water and back up to the cabin. I was so annoyed that I let that fear take away a really beautiful moment, that I wrote the title track because I realized how many other moments in my life have been taken by fear. The rest of the album, I realize the more I listen to it, is all about strength. They are all about decisive action, moving through hard things, and breaking through to the other side. I feel like this is an album of empowerment.

The last song on the album is in Galician, which is the dialect of my father’s home, Galicia, in the North of Spain. I really wanted to pay tribute to that part of my culture, and it’s a cover of a traditional song done by one of my favourite Galician artists; Carlos Nunez. It’s a traditional romance that translates into “washerwomen of the night”. It is about ghostly women who are sentenced to wander in the night after causing abortions. I thought it was also an important song to do right now with women being sentenced to suffering as a result of our rights to our bodies being taken away in an effort to control us.