♡ ♡ ♡ Happy New Year friends! I wish you love, health, and prosperity. ♡ ♡ ♡
May the road rise up to greet you
the sun shine warm upon your backs
and rain fall gently on your tracks
Welcome 2022
Hey there! It’s been a few months since I last wrote.
I’ve been soaking in the natural world around me like a thirsty sponge. Stress is starting to leave my body. I’ve never been this grateful for silence and the sounds of birds. The garden is growing and wildlife is off the charts. I’m so glad to see such abundance. My heart is full.
Now it seems this quiet time may be coming to an end. This year you might hear more from me. This year I hope to share Alnilam’s new EP Under the Sun!
It’s been 7 years since Indigo Sky came out. That’s a lucky number but also a mighty long time! Releasing more music after that album has been challenging for many reasons, yet the necessary ingredients eventually came together like a puzzle.
I think some of you who have been looking forward with me will love them too, and that makes me happy. I love all the arts, but it is with music that I feel I can reach/contribute the most creative and/or sublime expression, energy, emotion… That’s why I have always tried to make room for singing, writing etc. and intend to do so even more.
Under the Sun is a collaboration with Daniel Wright, an amazing musician, singer, songwriter, producer, member of the band Song Preservation Society, and lead singer for Radio Skies. I’m so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with him.
We met thanks to our friend, Manu Jimenez. Around 2015, he played Dan some tracks he was working on from Indigo Sky. He liked them and said he might want to collaborate someday. This meant a lot to me as an absolute beginner, I was already a fan of his band Song Preservation Society. Fortunately, years later, he was still interested in writing with me, so I headed off to Ojai, CA to meet Mr. Wright.
From May 2018 to January 2019, I drove from Santa Monica to sunny Ojai, to work with Dan on a few of my song sketches. In the end, we recorded demos of our five favorite songs from those sessions, a fresh new sound to tell the next chapter in the Alnilam story.
This EP has been literally years in the making, its partially crowdfunded production gradually moving forward against a backdrop of change and unpredictability. During this time, California faced fires, riots, lockdowns, and the pandemic. Some instruments had to be recorded remotely, including a full orchestra overseas. Dan became a dad (twice) and, shortly after recording vocals, I moved to a little surfer town in Costa Rica.
Under the Sun features Daniel Wright on guitars and back vocals, and several of the same talented, multi-cultural, studio musicians as Indigo Sky, like Jorge Balbi Castellano and Ian Walker again on drums and bass. Special guest, Grammy Award-nominated producer Marcus Kincy added moving, late-night keyboards, and Sandro Morales Santoro‘s beautiful string arrangements were performed by a 20-piece live orchestra in Macedonia!
The 5 new songs were recorded, and are currently being mixed, by Costa Rican sound engineer and producer Manu Jimenez, at Arimaka Studio in Los Feliz, CA. They will be mastered by Eric Boulanger at The Bakery in Los Angeles, and self-released as singles as soon as they are ready, on Spotify and other platforms. I’m working on some paintings and videos to go with them.
This will be the cover.
That’s it for now… looking forward to sharing more…
x o x o -Elena
ALNILAM 