Esperanza Spalding SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB 2LP (Vinyl)

Esperanza Spalding's new album SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB explores how songwriters may incorporate knowledge in consultation with practitioners of music therapy, neuroscience, and more to create music that can have a specific effect on the listener. These 12 new songs were created and recorded with different musicians in her traveling lab over several months and follow her GRAMMY Award-winning album from 2019, 12 Little Spells.

Esperanza launched the Songwrights Apothecary Lab in April 2020 with "Formwela 1", "Formwela 2" and "Formwela 3", a suite created as a salve for the grief and loneliness brought on by the pandemic, featuring a number of musicians including Wayne Shorter, Phoelix and Raphael Saadiq.

Connected by their need to enhance the ability to say what is most difficult to say between loved ones, she worked with collaborator Corey King on the soaring and stripped back single "Formwela 4", featuring arpeggiated acoustic guitar and duetting vocals. Esperanza shares that she crafted "Formwela 4" "for when an un-revealed current at the river bottom of your being needs to rise up and be made lovingly legible."

"i wish to channel the spaciousness, harmony and renewing power of the fecund land, channel it to the middle of the man-made fires

learn how to send it through the center of the ache, constriction, resistance, pain, stress, woe, worry...

I want to flow a music of soothing, energizing, and remembrance of life-sustaining systems through which we are each woven...

i want to carry a flow of that remembering into the center of the city...and the city of self."

- Esperanza Spalding

Songwrights Apothecary Lab is a gorgeously rendered production that skirts the lines between art rock, free jazz, and wordless modern creative improvisation....While there are deeply engaging moments on Songwrights Apothecary Lab, not to mention songs of deft compositional precision, it's an album far afield of the post-bop jazz, Latin, and R&B that initially earned Spalding attention. It's an expansive, challenging album that often feels as if we are hearing each song leap out of Spalding in the moment, fully formed or not. Nonetheless, it's clear that she is an immensely gifted and technically adept performer, something that remains at the forefront of Songwrights Apothecary Lab as she bounds with sprite-like joy through her kaleidoscopic formwelas.