Hey Rosetta!

SECOND SIGHT, Hey Rosetta!’s first album in nearly four years represents the longest musical gestation in the band’s history. In part, the delay was due to the lengthy touring cycle following the success of their last album Seeds, which was short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and resulted in the band’s first JUNO nomination and a performance on the JUNO telecast. There was also the band’s determination to expand their sonic horizons and, as songwriter Tim Baker puts it, “let each song come on its own terms and become what it will, unencumbered by some predetermined structure or symbolism or thesis.” So when the band started recording at Montreal’s MixArt studio in late 2013 with producer Marcus Paquin (The National, Stars, Local Natives, Arcade Fire) SECOND SIGHT began as a long list of these new songs with "no real concept, no over-arching theme to the work,” says Baker. “We had enough songs for an album – but what was the album about? What were we trying to say as artists? How did these songs relate to one another?” As the session progressed, things got clearer, but another familiar hurdle arose, “We didn’t have a single, which seems a perennial problem for us. We’ve never really had a single, but boy do people want one” Baker says. “At first we kicked against it, but then, eventually saw it as a challenge.” A second studio session was booked at MixArt from which “Kintsukuroi” emerged. It’s a song about real, broken, messy love, the title drawn from the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, thus producing a new object of beauty with flaws highlighted instead of hidden – the idea being, that the object is actually more beautiful for having been broken. SECOND SIGHT would also experience a rebirth – a re-breaking and the album’s vital lyrical connective tissue would reassemble to clearly define the common threads in Baker’s lyrics. “I’d been thinking about potential, about the great promise within all of us that we never seem to fully realize. And as an artist, I'd been fixating on how to get there. Which led to another of the album's main themes: this idea of shifting your vision slightly – moving away from your everyday, rational, denotative, leftbrain way of seeing the world and embracing a more suggestive, intuitive, animalistic and ultimately more interesting ‘second sight’.” like a seed in the split earth we were gathering courage