In 2016, San Francisco-based Sarah Gagnon formed Hectorine. TEARS, the band’s second album, followed up Hectorine’s 2019 debut with sketches of 70s soft rock production, folk melodies, and deeply lyrical songs that explore love, loss, nature, and the cosmos. For Arrow of Love, her third full-length album, which was released this spring on Take A Turn Records, Sarah Gagnon calls up the spirit of the Sumerian warrior goddess Inanna to explain the tumult that surrounded the making of it. In Mesopotamian myth, the goddess travels to the underworld to learn what there is to know about death and dies there. Though Inanna is rescued and reborn, she is forced to choose someone to take her place, and when she learns her lover Dumuzi has not mourned her, she condemns him. Hectorine’s latest album tells a lower key tale of death and rebirth, encompassing a period in which Gagnon lost a job and ended a relationship under the shadow of a modern plague and raging wildfires, retreating into enforced solitude until it was possible to emerge again. Arrow of Love recounts this process in chronological order, from the marimba-clinking opener “Is Love an Illusion” through the whispery desolation of Joan of Arc-themed “No Hallelujah” to the bubbling, resilient joy of the title track, near the end, as life and love reassert their pull. And yet, though the subject matter is heavy, the music is not. Gagnon’s velvety contralto — if you think she sounds a bit like Christine McVie, you’re not the first — weaves with assurance among trance-like dream pop architectures. For the album she worked with Geoff Saba of East Oakland’s Itinerant Home studio; he co-produced, engineered and mixed the album, while J.J. Golden mastered it. 
Arrow Of Love was out May 23th on Take A Turn Records.

What She Says: “This song was born out of the fear that your new beloved will do exactly that — slip through your fingers. Long ago a friend of mine had told me the story of how Joni Mitchell broke up with Graham Nash, by sending him a telegram from Greece which read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it’ll run through your fingers. Love, Joan.” I had just met someone after a long period of being single and I felt very scared, very vulnerable, I was afraid that if I showed my love too freely I would scare this person away, and I’m old enough to know that most relationships don’t last forever, and I sat down and wrote this song from start to finish in one sitting, which is rare for me, and I think that telegram was floating around somewhere in my subconscious. I probably also owe some inspiration to ABBA’s Slipping Through My Fingers as well — I mean lyrically, not musically. I’d recently discovered their 1981 masterpiece The Visitors and I listened to it nonstop that fall.“

“I did a lot of research on medieval armor for this one. It’s the title track and also perhaps the turning point in the story of the record’s narrator. It’s the moment in the warrior’s journey where she realizes she’s not impenetrable after all, despite her most valiant efforts to protect herself from head to toe. I suppose it’s a bit cliche — being pierced by the arrow of love, a projectile shot by some invisible Cupid perched up on a hill — but sometimes that’s what new love feels like. It can be a revelation as sudden and shocking and, yes, painful as an arrow through the heart. But it’s also an image that transcends space and time and it resonated with me. I think the viscerality of it was meaningful in some way. I always joke how this album is the closest to metal I’ve ever come but I’m mostly referring to the album art. But it’s also the first one where the lyrics deal with death in this particular way: “You wore your hardship valiantly, you wore it like a crown / The thorns were all around your head, the blood was dripping down / Meanwhile they tied me to the funeral pyre / The smoke was filling up my lungs as the flames leapt higher and higher.” This is from No Hallelujah, where we met Joan of Arc, weary and battleworn but quietly triumphant, and here the soldier returns, having died and risen like a phoenix from the ashes. And so in my imagination this arrow does not kill but transform — similar to the alchemy of death, and resurrection, but different. But then, every transformation requires a death to allow for something new, so maybe it’s about death after all.“

Her Mixtape:

Weekend – Nostalgia

This band rose like a phoenix from the ashes of Young Marble Giants, but La Varieté is a much sunnier effort, languid and dreamy, full of classical guitars and saxophone and strings. Perfect summer music. The lyrics of this song remind me of a Modiano book I once read called In the Cafe of Lost Youth, whose narrator ruminates on the concept of “eternal return” – a term coined, or at least discussed at length, by Nietzsche – which posits that all everything that’s happened will happen again exactly, infinitely, and eternally. Though I suppose that would lead to more déjà vu than nostalgia.

David Sylvian – Orpheus

I made the mistake of invoking the myth of Inanna regarding my new record – and now it seems like it’s all the interviewers want to talk about – but the truth is that I harbor a deep love for mythology, and Sylvian’s 1987 treatment of this classic myth is no exception. It’s noteworthy not only for the assistance of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ethereal keyboards but also for Sylvian’s exquisite lyrics. For example: “Sleepers sleep as we row the boat / Just you the weather and I gave up hope / But all of the hurdles that fell in our laps / Was fuel for the fire and straw for our backs / Still the voices have stories to tell / Of the power struggles in heaven and hell / But we feel secure against such mighty dreams / As Orpheus sings of the promise tomorrow may bring.” 

Judie Tzuke – Shoot From The Heart

Judie Tzuke is one of my favorite singers of all time. Her timbre, her pitch, it’s just perfect. She made a whole bunch of records starting in the late 70s and she was incredibly prolific – this tune is off her fifth studio album. I thought this was a love song but someone told me it’s about doing heroin. I don’t know where the truth lies. 

Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin – Levi Stubbs’ Tears

Our friend Josh Miller filled in on bass for our recent Southern California tour and played The Big Idea for us on the way down. It’s a mix of covers (like this one written by Billy Bragg) and Stewart originals. The covers are all incredibly imaginative, including their rendition of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” This Dave Stewart is of National Health and Bruford, not the Eurythmics, and Barbara Stewart was the vocalist for British folk prog band Spirogyra.

 

Karen Beth – Nothing Lasts

I discovered this song – this whole incredible album, in fact, called The Joys of Life – while I was back east last summer, and listened to it maybe 100 times in a row. It reminds me of Questions by Annette Peacock, a song I featured on my last go-round, in that it feels like it holds the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. That chorus – “But nothing can last, nothing will remain / Life is but a glowing stream of change / Forget the past, nothing lasts” – is a gem of wisdom I didn’t know I needed and now I can’t live without. Listening to this song has helped me reconcile with the ephemeral nature of life. I’d like to do a cover of it someday. 

Norma Tanega – Illusion

I write a lot about illusions on my new record. In fact, the original title was Illusions before I decided on Arrow of Love. I still wonder if I was right to change it, but at a certain point you just need to bite the bullet. Anyway, this is a perfectly composed and perfectly arranged piece – it’s just sublime. I learned recently that she was born in Vallejo, CA and was Dusty Springfield’s lover and wrote a bunch of songs for her, too.

 

Emmanuelle Parrenin – Plume Blanc, Plume Noir

French avant-folk from 1977. I don’t speak French but I’m guessing this has something to do with white feathers and black feathers. I’ve been thinking so much about wings these days, how to grow them in the way that Sandy Denny once alluded to, about what the act of flight requires. A dangerous endeavor, but a necessary one, too. Or, like Townes Van Zandt sang, “To live is to fly / All low and high / So shake the dust off of your wings / And the sleep out of your eyes / Ah shake the dust off of your wings / And the tears out of your eyes.”

Steve Kuhn – Time to Go

Kuhn’s most famous track is probably The Meaning of Love, but my partner showed me this song while we were traveling together last year, from the same record, each of us listening with one AirPod in bed, surely the intended way to listen to a 1971 self-titled melancholic free jazz opus – and it blew my mind. It ends with these lyrics: “Time to go as fast / As all the years went by me / Waiting for tomorrow’s sun to tell me why.” 

Arrow Of Love is out now on Take A Turn Records. Look HERE for more information on Hectorine.