Over the past five years, Zoh Amba has made a name for themself within the avant-garde jazz scene as a prolific collaborator alongside the likes of Bill Orcutt, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Jim White, and plenty of other heads who were releasing material long before Amba was born. Which makes Eyes Full something of a significant departure; not only does it mark Amba’s debut release for Matador Records, but it also sees the artist putting down their saxophone and picking up guitars—both electric and acoustic—as their erratic vocals take center stage. The result sounds like Big Thief descending into the realm of noise rock.
Lyrically, Amba seems just as concerned as Adrianne Lenker often is with the contrast of a rural childhood and their present-day city life. Eyes Full is something of a can’t-go-home-again reflection wherein the artist processes the fact that everything back in Tennessee has remained the same, though Amba has long outgrown the widespread cultural conservatism of the South (“Every time I come back South, people stare,” they put it bluntly when summarizing album closer “Smile with Your Eyes”). Yet the record never feels combative or condescending; instead, these songs pay respect to that culture through a twisted take on Americana and a genuine love for the working-class lifestyle and communal spirit of their hometown.
With Eyes Full out now, read through Amba’s track-by-track breakdown as you stream it below. You can also purchase the record here.
1. “OCD”
In Tennessee, there’s a state mental hospital for children and the state can take custody of your child and put them there. There’s this thing down there where I truly feel that instead of loving and guiding a beautiful mind, they force and push it all into some straight line. This song is just from the eyes of a child and seeing your best friend get taken into this and never quite get out.
2. “Another Time”
A simple love song about wrong time, wrong place and trying to see the beauty in the difficulties.
3. “Dead End Street”
I grew up in a tiny house on this dead-end street. You’d feel stuck up there surrounded by the woods, like you ain’t never getting out. The first verse—“My mama smoked packs of cigarettes a day, so I talked about the smell / Memories of it getting caught in my hair / And I buzzed my head when I left the South”—is just literal and also implies that when you come from addiction and incarceration as parents, you do your best, but it’s lifelong and that it’s got a hold on your mind and heart. “Where do you go / Close your eyes / Mama said ‘Don’t look / Two wrongs don’t make right.’” It’s about ending the cycles. And just because parents did wrong doesn’t mean that we can make wrong. Two wrongs don’t make right—just asking the dead-end street, “What can I be?” Dreaming and doing your best to get out and be what you’re supposed to be.
4. “Thousand Years”
It’s about just deep love and friendship and how those are relationships you looked lifetimes for and how those relationships keep you in this world.
5. “Southern Soil”
I wrote this after getting sent a mugshot of my dad all beat up. I was living in Brooklyn. I felt so useless on my part that I couldn’t help. The anger that I’ve carried left a bit and turned to understanding of a failed system that fails families. Not going to the system to help, but begging the Lord for help. In the South especially, these are secrets people keep so as to not involve the child. I think it isolates them so much where they just never come around out of shame. “You ain’t gotta keep those secrets that are keeping you away” and “I can’t be what I can’t see, but I’ll be the tears” and “Get out, get in, jumping over six-edged pigs, you can’t win in the pen…but I’ll go straight to the Lord and plea back your dreams and tears, and your mind, start again.”
6. “Eyes Full”
This is about just what in this life makes someone’s heart full. Questioning that. Questioning why.
7. “Blueberry Thorn”
I wrote about this girl I fell in love with, but I knew nothing was to ever come from it. The purity of the love was sweet to feel. Like such a sweet soul and knowing my heart was too messed up to enter such a thing. Lot of work to do.
8. “Emahoy”
I wrote this song while listening to the beautiful interviews of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on a bar stool at my favorite bar, Gold Star, last summer. She was a precious nun. Devoted her life to God and music despite all hardships she and her family faced.
9. “Weed Eating”
Wrote this one night on the floor in Brooklyn about how folks doing all the work for others deserve a first-class pass to heaven. Working class risin’ and was thinking about the look in the folks’ eyes from Kingsport. Just feeling “Ain’t enough time in this life to see the light” and how folks spend their whole life working their asses off—for what? Hopes to go to heaven? And even if denied, to fool the good Lord and get in anyway. People in the Bible Belt love saying that “we’re gonna burn in hell,” but I was just playing hardball and that we were getting into heaven no matter what.
10. “Odd Jobs”
I worked this coffee shop job by my apartment and I got fired after a month. But I got to know the neighborhood and watch the flow. I’d see my neighbor doing all the odd jobs like sweeping and cleaning the windows for dollars. Then that night he passed out on the street with a needle in his arm. He had some of the most strikingly beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.
11. “Child You’ll See”
I basically wrote this to my younger self. To all kids not being scared to challenge every form of this system and watch it all fall. The saxophone at the end was, at that time, the last time I’d played the horn and it felt beautiful. Now it doesn’t. But whatever I found in that felt right to put at the end of the song and kind of shows why I was playing it—what I was searching for. And now why I’m putting it down for a bit.
12. “PG Tips”
Jim [White] and I got in a fight because I was being dramatic and he was sensitive. He’s like my dad and brother all in one. I love him to death, and I sent this to him in the middle of the night and he forgave me. We don’t talk about it, but I think it touched his heart. His favorite tea used to be PG Tips.
13. “Smile with Your Eyes”
Every time I come back South, people stare. So I wrote that if you’re gonna stare, at least throw me some money and smile with your eyes. The lyric “Lost my sight for staring at the sun / I tried to burn what wasn’t right but wasn’t wrong” is about the Bible Belt. It’s also factual—I can’t see out of my right eye and I used to stare at the sun so much, as Albert Ayler did. It was all worth it.
