Album Notes

Sometymes Why first came to be in the dark, quiet corners of the string band renaissance. Fans of each other’s respective bands, Andreassen, Merenda, and O’Donovan had performed together in various contexts, both formal and informal, for years. “In 2004,” Andreassen recalls, “we went to an afterparty in Brooklyn. I sang ‘The Seasick Dawn,’ and those two harmonized. It sounded too dreamy to not want to do it again.”

“We each had a bunch of songs that didn’t work with our own bands,” Merenda adds, “but they worked together. It became apparent to me that this is where I am most comfortable is singing songs from a female perspective or that are very confessional. That’s what makes a Sometymes Why song for me.”

They were songs that fell through the cracks – long forgotten, ignored, or locked away in some special place for a later use that may never come. These songs finally emerged as the basis of something new in 2004, when Kristin Andreassen (Uncle Earl), Ruth Ungar Merenda (the Mammals), and Aoife O’Donovan (Crooked Still) decided to begin performing together. By some unagreed-upon combination of coincidence, design, and accident – the trio took those secret songs and, via an arresting DIY debut album and a series of riveting live performances, gave birth to an underground sensation they called Sometymes Why.

Your Heart Is a Glorious Machine, to be released by Signature Sounds on March 10, 2009, is the second Sometymes Why album. Produced by José Ayerve (Winterpills, Spouse), Glorious Machine finds Sometymes Why taking a step out of the shadows, while continuing to nurture the languorous, luminously intimate pop that first inspired them to pursue their collaboration more intently.

As implied by the title (named for a line in O’Donovan’s haunting “Glorious Machine”), Your Heart Is a Glorious Machine resonates with a weathered elegance. Sometymes Why’s vein of richly personal, slow-motion pop is enriched by new sonic elements (electric guitar, Hammond organ, unusual reverbs and echoes, the clatter of the belfry noisemakers) and by more visceral songs such as Merenda’s sly “Aphrodisiaholic” and Andreassen’s ingenious “The Stupid Kiss.”

Every moment of Your Heart Is a Glorious Machine is underpinned and illuminated by the palpable warmth and camaraderie of the trio. “It is amazing to be a part of a band that includes two of my closest girl friends,” O’Donovan concludes. “It feels like a sisterhood, a club. It’s very cathartic to be singing these original songs that have so much weight in all of our lives, and not to be singing them alone – to sing them together.”