Newfoundland seven-piece Hey Rosetta! recently unveiled their fourth full-length studio album, ‘Second Sight’, having won legions of fans over during tours accompanying the likes of City & Colour and The Jezabels.
While ‘Second Sight’ sees the band taking a couple steps away from the trademark folkiness of previous efforts, the album still illustrates the elegance, atmospheric complexity, and scope we’ve come to know as integral to the Hey Rosetta! sound.
In addition to its sterling aural attributes, ‘Second Sight’ features some of Hey Rosetta!’s most vivid and outward-looking lyrical rumination. To help us unweave the layers that make up ‘Second Sight’, we got the band to take us through the album, track by track.
Soft Offering (For The Oft Suffering)
“A song praising the night. A song about struggling through the day, with all of its expectations to be productive, responsible, occupied, communicative, punctual, etc. and really wanting only the escape of the night, with its sweet, stressless release and easy, imaginative hours.”
Gold Teeth
“A sort of present-day continuation of the famous Ron Hynes song ‘Sonny’s Dream’, in which a Newfoundland farm boy dreams of leaving his small town and his lonely (guilt-tripping) mother and seeking out the excitement of the big city. Well, since that song, it seems the story has changed and these days it’s more often everyone is leaving rural Newfoundland to find work and soon after dreaming of going back home to their bays and farms, as opposed to the other way round. This is a song that explores both yearnings – ultimately a meditation on one’s inability to ever feel whole and satisfied in one place.”
Dream
“A song about daydreams and fantasies and how important they are – not necessarily as an escape, but as something that actually directs your life and becomes truly possible. As Joan Didion wrote, ‘The dream teaches the dreamers how to live.'”
What Arrows
“A song about that mythic, pre-destined true love, about finding it, after so long doubting it existed, about its manifestation really in your life. The verses look at the mythic mechanisms of destiny: Cupid’s arrow, the ‘line of fate’, ‘God’s plan’. The outro, the power of love, so to speak, to make one impervious to fear, pain, death, despair. Basically, it should be a good track to kiss to.”
Promise
“This is a song about underachieving, about not living up to your potential, about being poor and unmotivated and unemployed but knowing better, and feeling and connecting and thinking well above your pay grade. It’s about having done nothing worth mentioning, but wishing that everyone could see you instead in terms of this big, beautiful, completely unrealized, but completely incredible promise within you.”
Kid Gloves
“A song about needing to be very careful with your sense of wonder. It’s this powerful, invaluable thing, but also it’s so delicate, and age and education weaken and destroy it. This song is about having to handle your child-like sense of imagination and trust with ‘kid gloves’. It’s something we had when we were kids (and actually felt and held the world with kid’s gloves), but it is something we lose so easily. The song will probably be seen as a sort of ‘drug narrative’ which is fine, but unfortunate, since it’s just proving the point: that we think any change of perspective, any sudden belief in the misunderstood and invisible, any sudden lifting-up is the result of drug use instead of the reanimation of our long-dead childhood minds.”
Neon Beyond
“This is about getting a raw deal, about when your life feels like one big succession of fuck-ups as you foray into the complete unknown with zero help or guidance from above or below or anyone else, about how it’s so easy and natural and tempting to think that you are not in control, that life is happening to you and there’s nothing you can do to affect this game of dice that the powerful and distant have rigged. The solution, perhaps, as suggested in the bridge, is to do one small thing, to be in control of one small thing, one pursuit, one craft and to do your best with it… to do your best and then let it go, offer it up like an arrow shot into the giant seething, swirling nebulous anarchic nothingness of existence and then see how that makes you feel. It usually makes me feel better.”
Kintsukuroi
“Kintsukuroi is the ancient Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, highlighting the faults and flaws, with the belief that it’s actually more beautiful having been broken. Through that conceit, this is a song about breaking up and breaking apart and through all the trauma actually growing closer and being together with a love that’s stronger, more significant and more beautiful than it was before.”
Cathedral Bells
“You are at a party and you are well underneath everyone else – sad, lonely, cut off, depressed even. Then you see someone who appears likewise. You meet, you speak, you are hoisted up, maybe by the mere realization that you’re not alone in what you feel. The power of a commiserator is often under guessed, but also, there is an attraction that lights you up. Where before there was watery greyness, now there is lava and there is the realization that these things can happen and do happen and will happen again. You get up. Perhaps, you dance.”
Alcatraz
“A letter from an incarcerated man. To his victims, to his family, to everyone, to you.”
Harriet
“A song about Harriet, who lives in her books and movies and Netflix, and every time she leaves the house the image she has built of herself collapses in the wind and the action of the real world, but we know the real Harriet – the protagonist inside, the potential, the hope, the strength, the beauty, because we are like her. We ask to be remembered for what we intend, not what we do. To be remembered for us, before we get lost in translation from what we want to be to what we end up being.”
Trish’s Song
“A song for a dear friend, a mother, a survivor.”
