California-based singer and songwriter, Arielle Silver, is a consummate storyteller whose Americana-roots-influenced songs, equally inspired by Laurel Canyon and Greenwich Village, are rich with imagery, empathy, and insight. Conceived in the quiet of the pandemic quarantine, her new 10-song collection, Watershed, takes its title as much from that watershed moment in time as it does from the North American spaces where the story-songs take place. Renewing and reflective, water runs through many of the songs as crosscurrents that connect ideas to experiences, and people to places.
Born on Florida’s Gulf Coast and raised up and down the Atlantic seaboard, Arielle now lives just a traffic jam away from the Pacific Ocean in her adopted home of Los Angeles. Memories of places and times serve as touchstones through her songs, as does the troubadour music traditions of folk, country, and rock that she heard from her guitar-strumming architect father. Throughout her music and storytelling runs an ethic of care, along with an essential wellspring of interpersonal relationships and ecological notice.
While in college and studying classical woodwinds, Arielle fell in love with songwriting when she picked up a $75 guitar from an old flame. She got her start busking in Boston’s Harvard Square and subways, but took a decade hiatus from music when she moved to the West Coast to focus on Eastern Philosophy and creative writing. She returned to songwriting in 2020 full force, with her fourth album, A Thousand Tiny Torches, which was selected by Music Connection as a year-end Top Prospect, Americana Highways as a top five Readers’ Favorite, and featured on LA’s tastemaker station 88.5FM.
Reflecting on the period of songwriting after A Thousand Tiny Torches and captured on Watershed, Arielle recalls nights of biking through her neighborhood streets in the quiet of lockdown. “The decade began in the cataclysm of global health and economic crises, national political catastrophes, and racial justice marches. Families and friend groups fractured in discord. But in my Los Angeles neighborhood, in spring of 2020, I watched the holiday lights go back up. Folks projected movies on the sides of their homes for the neighbors. People were doing what they could to shine some light in the darkest of times.”
Watershed kicks off with “Soft on the Shoulder,” inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of folk and rock music in calls for change. “It’s about giving space to listen to others’ points of view,” she clarifies. “This song repeats the mantra ‘love more, fear less’ and reminds me to do what I can to help heal wounds in our society.”
The lyrics of Watershed are sensory, and the flavors are delectable on “Bramble Vine,” which was inspired by making pie for her stepdaughter’s birthday. “I was thinking about those things we do that are hard, and worthwhile – like parenting, making pie, or building a life as an artist.”
With a rockabilly backbeat and a chorus of perky voices, “Rickie Lee” is a flirty homage to music and discovery. “Asteroids and Chaos” is a reminder for future calamities that kindness and love is the superpower that will help us through. “Riverdock at Sunset” unfolds with three verses inspired by time’s passage and the maiden/mother/crone archetype. The cinematic “Ghost Ships,” floating on a rapturous melody and mystic sonics, evokes the pull of past loves and voyages not taken, now adrift on distant tides.
Arielle’s songs shine with strength and hope in the artfully tracked Watershed song cycle. The lush and layered production reflects the return and natural evolution of her Tiny Torches dream team: producer, Shane Alexander; Grammy-winning mix/master engineer, Brian Yaskulka; and a coterie of accomplished musicians: Darby Orr on bass and keys, Jesse Siebenberg on slide and steel guitars, Denny Weston Jr. on drums and percussion, Justine Bennett with vocal harmonies, and Rob Hodges on cello. They are a cast of players whose collective credits include studios and stages with Lady Gaga, Lukas Nelson and The Promise of the Real, Liz Phair, Goldfrapp, Jakob Dylan, and KT Tunstall.
Focusing on small details and intimate impressions, the closing song on Watershed is “Bottle up Tonight,” a poignant coda, with the line “Forget all that we can’t control,” crystallizing an essential message of the album. “I came to this side of the turbulent pandemic time writing about peace, love, and understanding,” Arielle concludes. “In many ways, they are songs about appreciating the here and now.”