Nadeem SalaamA. Sarr | Praying Hands | Premiere
When Stevie Wonder wrote the now seared in your head album title, “Songs In The Key Of Life,” I’m sure he could only imagine a minutia of what that could mean for the world. Songs are in the key of life, for some like Andrew Sarrion, a song can be the very source of life. If the moody (almost atonal) synths wash you inwards and outwards like a distant shoreline, to only be guided home by the vocals of Ellen Winter, we might be on the right path for a story with many roads.
This was a song written on a hospital bed. The pale walls of a hospital room became something like an albatross for A. Sarr; equipped with a laptop running a trial version of Ableton, and a WiFi-less apparatus, he began drafting “Praying Hands,” and ultimately as he began to recover from the very failed suicide attempt that landed him in the hospital, an entire album was rooted from that experience.
Soon after sending friends the music, Russell Elliot and Ellen Winter contributed to the song. “Praying Hands” is a song about counting your blessings despite recent trauma, a magniloquent response to trauma in fact. Often its dreamy ethereal textures are met with the flow of Winter. The Elliot contribution marks an emotionally rattling moment–the image of someone running through the night dogging all the beauty, weakened to the fruits of life before falling to their knees,–it just shakes you up. The co-written piece from the trio goes further along a narrative theme on the end of the world, as A. Sarr puts it because, “That was the exact state of mind I had at the time.”
A. Sarr’s talent to combine the essence of disparate parts; to make them whole, must come from places many of us feel at times in our weakness when we are reaching for a way out, but not all fully succumb to, and not all crawl out of. Furthermore, it stands for good reason not all gush a depth of a talent, a certain subtly for the shadow and the light, because he is lucky to have a second chance and knows to a personal measure the meaning of what chances give you. He would have been robbing us from his inner-genius, and I think the world would be a less beautiful place if he did.
You can follow him on Facebook to find out when his upcoming record People In Your Life Are Seasons is due and send him some love.