You might think of Simon & Garfunkel when you first hear Cricket Blue, or of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. But their music is equally evocative of literary voices: Alice Munro. Dylan Thomas. Flannery O’Connor. Even a touch of Edward Gorey.
Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith are musicians, sure, but they're storytellers too. The eleven songs on their debut album Serotinalia feature a cast of characters right out of a short story collection. A listless grocery store clerk. A woman obsessed with her milkman. A harvest deity who is ritually murdered every fall. Oh, and a pair of scissors.
The album's title, Serotinalia, derives from the botanical term "serotiny," a trait of certain plants that release seeds in response to an external environmental trigger — such as a forest fire — rather than at a standard point of maturation. "We think people are serotinal in the way some plants are," Smith says. "You don't mature on a calendar schedule, but in response to these impinging forces."