“I believe in paradox,” says Sarah Hiltz, reflecting on the oxymoron that makes up the title of her latest album, CALM FURY. “I can hold both of those feelings at once.”
The new collection of songs grew out of Hiltz’s work on ‘The Fury Project,’ a period of deep research around anger and its various origins and connections.
“I realized a few years ago I actually don’t know how to express anger in a healthy way, no one ever taught me how to do that," Hiltz shared. So she set out to learn as much as she could about what it means to feel and express anger, for all different kinds of people. “When I told people that I was researching anger for the sake of writing songs, they assumed I was going to be experimenting with lots of distortion on my guitars, or other kinds of sounds we typically associate with angry music. But I want to highlight the fact that anger can look and sound like different things in different people. It’s expressed in different ways.”
photo by Nick Wong
After more than three years spent absorbing literature, articles and other sources of media, as well as interviewing experts, friends, family, and fellow artists, Hiltz is sharing the music inspired by her research. The resulting body of work bears witness to an artist who has not only come to terms with her own anger, but who is willing to embrace it when called for.
Whether it’s through lyric-driven storytelling (Love & Retreat, Daylight Savings), harmonically dense and odd-metred jazz (Move On, Bad Cycle) or a classic sounding ballad (Darling, I Suffer, As Long As You’re There), Hiltz clearly demonstrates many facets of anger across CALM FURY, all gathered under the banner of indie-folk songwriter.
