Earthstar Mountain

After releasing her third solo album, Welcome Home, in 2019, Hannah Cohen was sidelined like everyone else in the music industry by the COVID-19 pandemic. She went on to help her partner, Sam Owens (aka Sam Evian), convert their home and barn in the Catskills into a recording studio and retreat dubbed Flying Cloud Recordings, and she turned up on other artists recordings, among them Big Thiefs Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Sufjan Stevens Javelin, and John Legends My Favorite Dream. In the meantime, she worked on her fourth album, Earthstar Mountain, a set six years in the making that opens with the words "Its not supposed to be this hard/Everythings changin." Recorded at Flying Cloud and produced by Evian, it picks up where the dreamy Welcome Home left off, taking its 70s AM radio-evoking vibe even further for her dreamiest outing yet. To give a sense of its softness, it was fashioned with participation from the likes of Sufjan, Clairo, Liam Kazar, strings specialist Oliver Hill (Dirty Projectors, Pavo Pavo), and percussionist Sean Mullins (Will Stratton, Kate Bollinger). That opening track, "Dusty," sets the stage not only with a wide-angle world view that addresses the qualities of change, time, sound, and "the things you find playing around with your mind" but with a lush, reverb-tinged soft rock palette that includes strings, flute voices, claves and shakers, an easygoing funk groove, and wispy, multi-tracked vocals that seem to float in from an altered reality, like a Teletubbies sunrise. At the same time that Earthstar Mountain is otherworldly, its comforting and familiar, with songs that suggest everything from loungey disco-soul ("Summer Sweat") and Morricone (the quasi-instrumental "Una Spiaggia") to Fleetwood Mac ("Mountain"), for starters. The latter song is a melancholy one inspired by loss ("Losing you is a mountain of stillness") and featuring Stevens on backing vocals. Even on songs that grieve, however, the albums breezy character never subsides, with centerpiece "Earthstar" perhaps best exemplifying its twinkling, well-padded universe in which one can safely wonder if you can ever really know anyone. In addition to Earthstar Mountains consistently warm soundscape, Cohen is at her most accomplished yet songwriting-wise, even offering up an ode to a "Rag" that strips things down to notice the small comforts all around. ~ Marcy Donelson