Sailors take warning: The title of h. pruz’s new solo LP Red Sky at Morning is a bit of a misnomer, with its nautical caution misrepresenting 11 songs that are far from stormy. While detailing the project, Queens-based songwriter Hannah Pruzinsky eagerly notes the screaming heard in the mix on late-album track “Krista,” while mentioning that the preceding “If You Cannot Make It Stop” was their attempt at creating the visceral noise of a live set. Yet Red Sky is instead defined by the hearth at the center of each track—an ambient warmth heating a roomful of close friends and creative or romantic partners throughout the impending winter.
It’s worth noting that the “solo” descriptor is also a bit of a red herring, mostly just serving to differentiate the material from the Two Birds LP Pruzinsky released over the summer with their new band Sister.. In their track-by-track breakdown of Red Sky, they’re quick to shout out all of the “friend features” that line the album (including Told Slant’s Felix Walworth, who co-produced the record, Skullcrusher’s Helen Ballentine, Florist’s Emily Sprague, songwriter Elijah Wolf, Sister. bandmates James Chrisman and Ceci Sturman, and plenty more) while noting how several of the songs were significantly improved upon by their collaborators after the original demos were recorded.
You can listen to the record (out now via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co.) below, and read on for Pruzinsky’s description of how each song came together.
1. “Come”
This was the last song I wrote for the record. It feels like a culmination of the many things that excite me enough to write: ruminating on dreams, the past, memories. It was the first song we recorded for the record. I had a vision for some disruptive horns or woodwinds, something so brief that you can’t be sure it existed at all. Al [Carlson] brought that to life with saxophone. Emily [Sprague] added a synth line at a point when I had assumed the song was complete, and I’ve been obsessed with that brief moment in the middle of the song ever since.
2. “Arrival”
Arrival represents domestic bliss to an extreme, teetering on the edge of insanity. I wrote it the first winter I had ever spent living with a partner. Felix [Walworth] insisted on an idea for weeks leading up to recording the album that the track should be slowed down. I was hesitant, but this song turned out to be one of the prime examples of when collaboration blossoms a song into a whole other world. The groove was heavily inspired by a lot of the drum and bass patterns on [Neil Young’s] Harvest—we love Neil in this house.
3. “After Always”
I’ve gotten to play this song a lot in the past year or so on tour with my band. Having that experience really shaped what this song evolved into from its original demo form. We brought Jonnie [Baker], my bassist, in to record the rhythm section with Felix and I live for this track, allowing us to recreate the groove that was so essential from touring this song on little runs over the past two years.
4. “Siren Song”
5. “Leaving a Wound Without a Mark”
6. “Whatever Comes Through”
These three instrumental tracks all evolved spontaneously one night during our month-long stay at Felix’s Ya Ya’s house, where we recorded the album. We would invite friends of ours to stay a few days at a time at the house in the middle of winter—a rare respite from the cabin fever that can arise being upstate in January. Helen [Ballentine, a.k.a. Skullcrusher] and Jonnie joined us for a few days, and one night we turned on the tape machine and just started recording some improvised instrumental pieces. These songs were found the next morning after listening back.
7. “Your Hands”
“Your Hands” has the most friend features of any song on the record. I think it also feels the happiest to me, in a way. When I listen back I think of the importance of deciding to continue on in a long journey of rare love. I’m glad so many of the people I care about most in this world had a hand in this one: Felix, Rick [Spataro], James [Chrisman], Ceci [Sturman], and my baby, Marcie.
8. “If You Cannot Make It Stop”
This song utterly transformed from where I first tracked it as a demo alone in my apartment. Felix and I had a feverish evening in the house one night attempting to create a song that felt like listening to an extremely loud band in a room, something pretty antithetical to a lot of the h. pruz catalog. We both also got to solo on it (via electric guitar), which was a lot of fun. This wound up being one of my favorite mixes to run to, something I’d often do on days between recording.
9. “Force”
This is maybe the first song I wrote on the record, one of the songs I’ve played live for what feels like ages now. We recorded the vocals and guitar simultaneously because they feel so inextricable at this point to me. It’s a memory I often come back to.
10. “Krista”
“Krista” is about desire and disgust and longing and annoyance. It’s my favorite bass line on the album. For a while, we’d envisioned recording the speaking parts in reverse and then playing them backward to be aligned properly, creating the vocal effect á la the characters in Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge. This ended up being too difficult to attempt to learn the entire dialogue backward in a month while creating an album, so we recorded it normally. I did insist on screaming, however, and I think I’ll be doing more of that.
11. “Sailor’s Warning”
This song used to be connected to “After Always,” one always following the other. In deciding on the sequencing of the album, though, the order had to feel like a journey, and the journey had to end on a question for me—this one being in the form of a warning in the sky. I’d like that answer to make itself known in the spaces between music and art: in the living. What does it mean for any of us to see a foreboding path ahead and still choose to go onward? I’m excited to find out.
