Throughout time and across cultures, salt has been used as a shield, strewn about to purify an area, poured out to safeguard from harm. With her latest album, Salt Around My Bed, Mynolia is sprinkling her music like salt around the peace she has found over the last few years.
Born from a season of shifting and reshaping, the spectral folk singer-songwriter's sophomore effort – and first release in partnership with Full Time Hobby – is an invitation into a deeply transformative space, one that finds her navigating a lifetime of change, making sense of the turmoil currently marring the present day, but also giving a voice to all she has learned along the way.
Salt Around My Bed is forged in contrasting attitudes and shaded by duality: where there is surrender also lies sturdy boundaries; sincerity is tinged in playfulness; dreams bleed into reality; and the cynical is met with the sacred. Songs like the pillowy "Holy Line" and delicate "Surrender & Ash" strikingly capture this chapter and the beautiful paradox of relinquishing restraints in order to find a wholeness.
Together, with the help of co-producer Rich Ruth and a widespread array of unnervingly talented friends, they strike a brilliant balance, crafting a sound that is wholly Mynolia as she is now: earthen and serene, gritty but grinning, cosmic and alive, a mystic folk cast in a Berliner haze and warped by a Southern heat. In this way, Salt Around My Bed is a staggering snapshot of artistic and personal evolution.
