ZELLA DAY - HAND AS MY ARROW
I spent the summer of my fifteenth-year driving for weeks on end through the grassy plains and Colonial-revival houses with stars-and-stripes-flag-kissed front porches, of the American midwest. Needing fresh air and miles of blue sky to think about the direction I wished to move in relation to the first love of my life, my mother and I glid up-and-down New England and the red-blood-pumping heart of the U.S., reaching as far south as the powdered sugared-beignets of Louisiana. When my feet were on the dashboard and earbuds hung from my ears, Zella Day’s debut album Kicker bathed the rolling landscape in sound: her love letter to the tall trees and starry skies of Arkansas, intermingling with the golden cornfields, green pastures and fluffy clouds around me. Day’s 2022 album Sunday In Heaven, put out after the singer-songwriter’s switch to Concord Records, is a kaleidoscope of jewel-toned sequins manufactured in the 1970s.
The saltshaker beat and yearning vocals of “Mushroom Punch” is creamy emerald; the slowed tempo and brassy instrumentation of “Girls” is sumptuous eggplant; the glimmering timing and raw vocal performance of “Radio Silence” is opaque ruby; the glossy production and iridescent rhythm section of “Golden” is rich mustard.
Day’s latest single “Hand As My Arrow” materializes before my eyes as an expansive desert of white-yellow sand, populated with cacti thirsty for rain and ever-so-rarely dotted with tropical pink flowers whose petals reflect sunlight like gemstones. The air is as thick as honey but as dry as a feather; there is no wind to stir the unbreathing landscape; the stretch of hot, dusty terrain seems to be unchanging, as if abandoned by even time itself. A steady gritty and airy drumbeat lays out the land, the sparseness of instrumentation evokes vastness and aridness, an aural feeling of a layer of haze is spread across the song, and Day’s and the BROODS siblings’ (Georgia and Caleb Nott) plucky lines of acoustic guitar mirror suspected shimmers in the desert’s mirage or the clinking of wandering boots. High keyboard notes with a sparkling quality dip into the song’s verses – the few desert flowers with petals like gemstone. Zella’s sweet nightingale voice springs forth in the first verse like a mystical spirit, the voice of light or of the stars, arising out of thin air. BROODS’ Georgia Nott’s romantic, herbaceous voice appears in the first pre-chorus, close behind Zella’s, the harmony of voices beckoning, and leading the listener across the desert landscape.
In the second verse Georgia’s voice, the voice of flora and of Spring, leads the listener. “Hand As My Arrow’s” choruses remind me of crystal clear pools: Zella and Georgia’s voices roll waves of a flowing melody that lap against the gritty and airy drumbeat, their voices pure and shimmering, promising cleansing to she who bathes in the crystal waters. In the pre- choruses, beat drops with an earthy and shining quality resemble smooth stones leading to a body of water and a rippling texture resembles trickles of water falling downstream from somewhere beyond view.
The story that “Hand As My Arrow’s” lyrics tell is interwoven with the spirituality of the song’s effect on my senses. Rebirth, guidance by a higher power (the power of redemption that a loved one possesses, rather than the higher power of a disembodied force), and growth are themes expressed by the lyrics. In the first verse, Zella voices fear of oneself becoming another person, “You think it’s strange, such a sudden change / Nervous like a flower / Who doubts the spring, a life, it’s often dreamed.”
The choruses speak to the storminess that often goes hand-in-hand with change, but the singers tether this storminess to cleansing, and to the new life that awaits one on the other side, “Thunder and lightning soft as the rain /…there’s a world to gain.” Georgia’s verse is a hymn to those that find us at the right time and lead us to embarking on a journey of transformation, “With your hand as my arrow /…I see right through the sky and back to you / With your hand as my arrow / A natural force, it finds me right on course.” Accompanying the debut of the song’s music video visuals on Instagram, Day wrote the caption, “Here is a seed to the world to live and never die…in the cycles and changes in which it partakes. We were inspired by love waiting on the other side, ‘it finds me right on course’.”
To visit Zella’s official site, click here!
To listen to Hand As My Arrow, click here!
