According to modern science, more than ninety percent of the universe is composed of dark matter. That is, mass we can neither see nor understand. Though—we’re trying. We’re always trying. As Asheville songwriter Julia Sanders’ forthcoming album, titled in reference to this ubiquitous phenomenon, opens: This girl’s been asking why since she was just a kid.
“Is it a force like gravity that we don’t yet know how to measure?” Sanders wonders. “Is it the Divine? The Qi? And if we’re all connected by some invisible glue we know nothing about, how are any of us worrying about a follow-up email or whether that person likes us back?” It’s a good albeit overwhelming point, the kind of incomprehensible truth just as likely to ruin us as it is to set us free. Rather than let mystery paralyze her, Sanders channeled her all-consuming awe into music, eleven songs dedicated to questions—Is there any such thing as true contentment? What happens when we die? What’s the point of this life?—usually easier left unasked. “With this album, I stopped focusing on what I wanted to write about, and thought about what I didn’t want to write about.” Sanders says. “And why didn’t I want to write about it.”
At the time Sanders began, challenging notions swirled around her. She’d entered a new phase of motherhood, every day shaped by the endlessly evolving adventure it is to raise a human being. Meanwhile, her own mother, with whom relations had been historically strained, was nearing the end of her life. Album standout “Star Stickers” illuminates these circular complexities of the human experience with stunning grace: Seems like I was just a girl / Now I have one of my own / So I’ll stay a little longer / Because I know how it feels alone. The song came to Sanders while she was readying her daughter for sleep one night. “Watching the yellow-green glow of star stickers on my daughter's ceiling, I felt like I was time traveling—to my own childhood bedroom, needing my mother to be different than she could be, then back to this room, trying hard to be a different kind of mother for my own children, and then to the future, where nothing is known except that none of this lasts.”
Throughout the record, Sanders brings this bold, generous vulnerability from her inner world to the outer, masterfully bridging gaps between the two. She approached “Unsatisfiable” as an examination of her struggle with depression, questioning her own capacity for contentment. It begins as a relatable lament in the vein of ‘What’s wrong with me?’— a witty reckoning with personal impossibilities: I want to be loud / But I don’t want to shout / I miss my friends / But I hate going out / Don’t want to grow old / But I want to be wise / I want to know the plan / But I want the surprise. But as the song goes on, Sanders—crucially—notices the obstacles beyond her control. She shifts from self-blame to a confrontation of Capitalism, and the systemic flaws that doom us all: Pursuit of happiness / It was there at the start / Like it's something you chase / Instead of something you are.
“Body” boasts a similarly astute evolution. Sanders started the song as a lullaby for her young son, a devoted ode to the gift of having acted as his physical home, and to the power of a parent to provide animal comfort with their very heartbeat, voice, embrace: My body is a home / It made you it saves you / it’s all you’ve never known. She holds the vessel as divine—and tightly, in spite of an anti-aging industry that posits the body as a meat sack set to expire, its onslaught of preservation potions and death-defying salves for sale: My body is a phase / It wanes and it waxes / In silver as we age. By the last verse, the song thunders—a chant, even protest. “Roe was overturned while I was writing this one,” Sanders says. “And attacks on the Trans community had become daily occurrences.” Her mediation on the body—as maternal, mortal, and political—ranges from reverence to rage. My body is my own / You men in your courts / With the hatred in your bones / Tell us what to do / And we will pull you from your thrones.
The daughter of a painter and a sculptor, Sanders knew the power of creativity from a young age. She learned to play the violin around age five. In middle school, she picked up the guitar and never put it down again. Though, the idea of making music in a professional capacity seemed elusive to Sanders, if not alien—“I thought of it like this mysterious thing that happened in secret studios, on a different planet”— until, in her twenties, she moved to New Orleans. Neighbors like Sam Doores of The Deslondes and Alynda Segarra of Hurray For The Riff Raff brought the process back down to earth. “I’d see these people play their songs around the fire, or in bars, and it all immediately seemed so much more organic.” Amidst the supportive voices of an artist community, Sanders quieted the one inside herself that had told her not to try.
In 2016, Sanders made the move to Asheville. North Carolina offered a spacious quietude, a mountainous hush, where she says, “it was easier to hear myself.” She released her first full-length On the Line in 2018, followed by Morning Star in 2022. Though all along, Sanders kept her NOLA community closely involved, many of whom made their own migrations to the Land of the Sky. For her third album, she enlisted longtime collaborator John James Tourville to produce, and artists like close friend Esther Rose, Julie Odell, and Erica Lewis of Tuba Skinny to feature. There’s a fit rawness to the forthcoming collection, an off-kilter grit reminiscent of The Velvet Underground and Mazzy Star. Sanders’ melodious vocals draw quick comparison to Natalie Merchant, lithe and lilting and occasionally bent with twang. She opts for a textured imperfection in the recordings, a form of sonic solidarity with the roughness of her subject matter.
“The album takes on really difficult questions,” Sanders says. “But the point isn’t to answer them. It’s to surrender. To the unknown. To the invisible magic that—hey, turns out—makes up most of our world.”
(Bio courtesy of Maddie Corbin, Luck Bird Media )