Doe Paoro: After

It was bound to happen. As more and more bands in the extended Bon Iver family have made use of Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in the tiny village of Fall Creek, Wis., the location and the sensibilities of the musicians who overlap on these releases (and sleep there in bunk beds while recording) have begun to create a distinct sound. April Base seems like a place you’d find locally made art on the walls, Bruce Hornsby on the turntable, and half-eaten bags of trail mix on the counters. In the same way Matthew E. White's Spacebomb house band stamps its records with vintage-horn-section grandiosity, April Base recordings tend to have a liquid, woodsy aura like the one Vernon debuted on Bon Iver in 2011.  

Enter Doe Paoro, who turned heads with her smoky, soulful voice on 2012 debut Slow to Love, which she wrote on a Vernon-esque cabin retreat outside Syracuse, N.Y. Though she didn’t know Vernon, when it came time to record a new batch of songs, she reached out to him, and he ended up producing her single "The Wind" and also introduced her to the production team of S. Carey and BJ Burton, who has produced, engineered, or mixed several others in the extended family (Carey, Volcano Choir, Colin Stetson, Megafaun). Burton, who also produced Low’s recent Ones and Sixes in Wisconsin, wisely realized it wouldn’t make sense to give Low the heavy duty cycle of April Base’s sonic wash, which can be dialed up (Repave) or down (Range of Light). For After, Doe Paoro gets the full-on Wilson Phillips-in-the-woods treatment. It fits her just right.

A lot of the conversation surrounding Paoro (real name Sonia Kreitzer) has focused on her time in Tibet and her study of Lhamo, an ancient form of Tibetan folk opera. But rather than a direct influence on her sound, Lhamo seems to represent one of the many ways Doe experiments with form. On After, she’s not tied to a specific song structure or genre just as she’s not easily described by one type of vocal tradition. Vintage and modern R&B, soul, Fiona Apple, and '80s synth-pop all commingle. 

When Paoro originally released "Traveling", it was a minimalist performance video with just Paoro on vocals and Guy Blakeslee of the Entrance Band on guitar, but on After, the guitar is subbed for coughing woodwinds, muted synths, and processed keys. "Silence can be so loud, it’s abrasive," she sings, countering any preconceived, romantic notion of isolation. Holing up in a cabin can block out the din of humanity, but that withdrawal can also amplify your own thoughts, making them louder than you ever imagined. "I wanted solitude and that’s what I got/ Now I’m a living island with only one thought: Maybe I was wrong," she sings as organ and the April Base horn section swell and those "In the Air Tonight" drums kick in.

Either version of "Traveling" is a winner, and that malleability makes Doe Paoro something special. While there’s a familiarity to the production of Carey and Burton, the backdrops they create for Paoro are experimental and filled with surprises. Drums disappear as quickly as they appear. Pulsing bass drives "Nostalgia", while the patiently paced "Outlines" finds Paoro alone with a piano, pausing between bluesy phrases and relishing her chance to take center stage as a damaged but defiant torch singer. 

As much as the producers and collection of studio musicians imprint After, their influence wouldn’t allow just any songwriter to shine. Paoro, alongside co-writers like Peter Morén and Adam Rhodes, uses the album to reckon with loss and all of its implications, especially as it relates to time—knowing that you’re knee-deep in the aftermath, but not yet on the precipice of something else. The future is a bunch of white space, neither something to get excited about nor dread. So what do you do with the present? Well, for one, you don’t dwell on the past. "Nostalgia is killing us," Paoro sings. And on "Hypotheticals", she realizes questions like "What’s fair?" aren’t even worth answering. "I won’t indulge in hypotheticals," she spits out in a blast, turning something that could be a tossed-off sound bite from an Aaron Sorkin drama into a charged, anthemic refusal to let someone else change her story. Making peace with something as painful as loss is a messy task. After is a confident, beautiful, clear-eyed testament to that mess.