“Persimmon” is available on streaming platforms starting Friday.
By Dan Ray
Des Moines songwriter Abbie Sawyer’s second solo release, “Persimmon,” focuses on grief, but it isn’t sad. It’s a cathartic, patient and even hopeful meditation on the time it takes to heal.
In the three years since she dropped her first solo project, “Love Is a Flood,” Sawyer lost several members of her family. She had heard it takes a full year to move past the initial grief period, so she waited. Well, kind of. She also wrote an album.
“Thinking of like, ‘OK, a year, a year, a year.’ What does it mean to grieve for a year?” she said. “And what power does that have, to wait for four seasons of nature’s influence on you?”
You can hear that influence throughout the album. “Persimmon” oscillates between intimate, wintry tracks like the aptly titled “January” and more upbeat, springy songs like the title track.
While persimmons are Sawyer’s favorite fruit, “Persimmon” doesn’t actually have anything to do with that. The song’s first verse is about Sawyer’s husband, the second is about her daughter and the third is about her son. When she first played the song for her husband, she said, “we both started sobbing, realizing how grateful we were just to be together, to have our kids and our family in the midst of knowing nothing lasts.”
Instead of going into the studio, Sawyer recruited xBk’s Gabe Scheid to help her engineer, mix and co-produce the album right in her living room. She wanted the recordings to capture the same intimacy she felt when she wrote them. “ What I was trying to reach for are the things beyond” sensory comforts, she said. “So I needed all the other tactile things in place so I wouldn’t focus on them. I could go beyond that.”
One thing Sawyer didn’t expect was how much the recording became a community project. So Sawyer and Scheid could get the perfect take, neighbors graciously rearranged their noisy spring gardening schedules. Scheid set up a makeshift workstation on Sawyer’s dining room table. Even Mother Nature got in on it: If you listen closely, you can hear birds chirping at the end of “Empty Drawer.” Ultimately, the process created a more complete picture of the humanity and real world Sawyer wanted to convey.
“This album is very special and personal to me, but the reason I’m sharing it as a public work is I hope it brings a sense of comfort, a sense of wonder and a sense of hope to people going through inevitable human experiences,” she said.
For the biggest deep breath and tallest glass of hope, I recommend “Sunken Sailor,” “January” and “Going Back to Markdale.”
“Persimmon” is available for purchase and on streaming platforms Friday, April 25. If you’d like to hear it live, check out the album release shows on May 3 at Trumpet Blossom in Iowa City or May 9 at the Temple Theater here in Des Moines.
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