"The Grace," from The Almighty Yellow Star's eponymous debut album, begins with a flourish of lush sound that grows and fades away. Out of it emerges a stately guitar, steady yet unresolved. Kierstin Sieser's sharp, insistent voice comes in strong.
"I am looking for a woman who's not writhing in her weakness," Sieser sings. She then unfolds lyrics full of imagery, a gavel to the guts, a line of men tied together by cord and led through town as an act of absolution; other people moving quietly through a dark, quiet garden. "Oh the grace, oh the grace, oh the grace," she chants.
The album, which came out in May, has been preceded and followed by a string of shows from this new musical project, though Sieser is no stranger to the New Haven and greater Connecticut music scene. The Almighty Yellow Star represents a new direction for the songwriter, though in another way she's following ideas that have been with her from the beginning.
It's thoroughly intentional that the album sounds overtly religious.
"This album is, in many ways, about mortality. About the idea that we have a divine purpose that we can rarely understand in full," Sieser said. "it's an attempt to find some sort of holiness in everything. Even the darkness," and even when "that’s something I still and will always struggle to see." But The Almightly Yellow Star isn't about converting; it's about connecting, and creating space to ask big questions that don't necessarily have answers.
The songs were written in the past couple years, some of them starting out as poems. A couple were written when Sieser was still fronting her previous band, Tiny Ocean. That band played across New Haven and beyond and produced two full albums of songs written by Sieser. "I became such a better musician and band leader playing with them," Sieser said of the band, which included Keith Newman on bass, Jon Morse on drums, and Hollis Dunlap on lead guitar. But she also wanted to try a different kind of sound. "I wanted to strip a lot of stuff down and get messier, sonically messier. I wanted to experiment more," she said.
She found willing collaborators in Samantha Miller on bass and vocals and Paul Belbusti on drums, guitar, and synths. Belbusti, the mastermind behind the New Haven-based musical project Mercy Choir, "is a songwriter," Sieser said, and "understanding from a songwriter perspective and being a percussionist is so valuable and not always found." Miller is a decade younger than Sieser and Belbusti; she is self-taught on the bass and "just listens," Sieser said. "She goes to the right place instinctively and I love that."
Belbusti's and Miller's empathetic playing helped Sieser find the new direction she was hoping for, musically and lyrically. "I'm an intuitive musician in a sense," Sieser said. "I don't really read music." But she finds that "having the boundaries is good. At some point, you then need to expand them, but for an approach, that's what I was looking for."
The desire for a new approach came in part from personal change. "Five years ago, when I fell in love more deeply than I ever had, it was complicated and messy, but it felt like a gift. To deny it would have been to deny something pure," Sieser said. "That kind of love cracked me open" and "dropped me into a world I could finally explore and begin to build from the inside out."
Sieser is also a painter, so it makes sense that the spark of a song "often begins with a visual, a snapshot of that world," she said. "Other times, it begins with the language itself doing something mysterious in my mind, something playful and intoxicating. Then the song begins to take shape. It’s less like I’m constructing something I’ve planned, and more like I’m discovering it." And "sometimes the song comes from something I know I’m wrestling with, sometimes from something I don’t yet know is there. Either way, the song becomes the space to explore it."
Finding a new sound was in part about focusing more — and getting listeners to focus more — on the words. "I've always been lyrically driven," she said. So "the empty space" in the sound "is important to me too," for, in a sense, the chance to explore, to move away from the somewhat more personal songwriting she had done and to move toward something else. "Maybe it's getting older," she said. "We're less interesting to ourselves, and there's so much other beautiful, messy stuff to think and write about." Even as "we're part of the beautiful mess. It's woven into the tapestry, but it's not just always the source. I don't want it or need it to be the source any more."
"The throughline of it," she said, with a hefty dose of self-awareness and humility, is that "I'm trying to wrestle with the idea of, I don't want to say a divine plan, but synchronicity, the place for everything, in the music, in life and the universe." And in recording and performing the songs, she hopes to be a part of that, by connecting with others. "I think a lot about the invisible connections between people — people who don’t or barely know each other but feel bound by something real. About how someone you hardly knew can pass away and still leave a song in their wake, a memory that becomes a blessing."
Her approach to the questions is in some ways guided and framed by the Jewish faith she grew up in. The songs are "very much about relationships, what they mean to us, and what they mean in the context of G-d," Sieser said. "What I’ve always found unique about Judaism is the focus on what we do while we’re alive, here, together. It’s grounded in this world, even as it reaches for mystery."
"There’s also relationship in the sense of forgiveness, of grace, of fear, and how transcendence and vulnerability might be two sides of the same door," she said.
Sieser's musical ideas are still evolving. Even as The Almighty Yellow Star finds its audience, she's in the process of recording an entirely solo album, perhaps even sparser than the songs on The Almighty Yellow Star are. After that, she wants to perhaps make an album of electronic music with Belbusti. "That's something I want people to be able to dance to," she said. But at least right now, she imagines even that project to be devotional in nature. "Every love song is also a devotional song," she said.
"I'm wrestling every day but I'm not searching," Sieser said. "This is the thread I'm pulling," and "I want to explore this throughline for a while."
The Almighty Yellow Star is available on Bandcamp and other streaming platforms. Follow The Almighty Yellow Star on Instagram for show announcements.
