The name of Wet’s fourth album, “Two Lives,” originated during a dramatic moment in 2022. Singer-writer Kelly Zutrau was in Portland with the producer Buddy Ross (Frank Ocean, Haim), and the two were struggling to focus on music. But Zutrau was jolted into action when she received some surprising news: She was pregnant. At first, she felt overwhelmed by grief. Her future suddenly felt narrow and constricted, the limitless potential of youth yanked from her in a single moment. That day, she wrote the lyric that would define the mood of the entire record: “I wish I could live two lives.” Zutrau and Ross wrote most of “Two Lives” in the days following the positive pregnancy test. “Two Lives” is a document of the uncertainty that surrounds life’s major transitions.
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Wet fans will hear Zutrau’s personal evolution across “Two Lives,” an album on which she grapples with memories of her own childhood as she faces the daunting transition into motherhood. In a recent interview, she recalled her early experiences growing up in Boston as the first of four daughters to her young single mother in the 1990s. “We were constantly moving around and lived with a certain amount of unpredictability, but my mom was very encouraging of anything artistic. Always signing us up for local plays, and taking me to singing auditions.” Zutrau said. You can feel this sense of unpredictability on “Two Lives,” as Zutrau explores ideas of home, restlessness, and the eternal search for something that’s been missing. Zutrau taps into the surreal space between the past and the present, creating a dreamy collage of memories and emotional ephemera.
Wet’s sound has evolved, too: During Wet’s early days, the group established themselves as savvy pop songwriters with a knack for genre-defying production. As Zutrau has evolved, she’s retreated from the polish and tidiness of her earlier songs. She still has a pop sensibility and an ear for hooks, as demonstrated on “Nostalgia,” her 2023 collaboration with rapper Rod Wave and her first appearance on a Billboard chart-topping album, along with her recent appearance on Fred Again’s “Actual Life 3” album. But now, after a decade of making slicker-sounding albums and collaborations, Zutrau has accessed a deeper, messier realm of her artistic psyche, and seems to be more interested in working at the unfinished fringes of pop. The album was produced and recorded with Zutrau’s longtime collaborators Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow, along with Daniel Aged (Inc. no world, Rosalia) Amber Coffman (Dirty Projectors), Buddy Ross and Aidan Spiro. The result of these collaborations is a project that is sometimes melancholic, sometimes bright, and always soulful.
This is a standing room-only performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.
ABOUT ELORI SAXL + HENRY SOLOMON
Long running collaborators Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon present their new duo. Both are key players in an emerging US underground of experimental composers who are redefining the modern vanguard. While Solomon is rooted in LA’s fertile jazz underground, Saxl is a proponent of NYC, taking up the torch of minimalism and fusing it with an electronic sensibility informed by soundsystem culture and modern pop production. Their debut album as a duo, Seeing Is Forgetting, is a work of stunning fluidity and intimate interplay. Across its nine tracks, Solomon’s baritone sax and bass clarinet weave tendrils around Saxl’s heartwrenching Juno 106 harmonies.
While Solomon has been an active contributor to Saxl’s work over the last half decade, playing in her quartet live and accompanying her on the Texada soundtrack and Drifts and Surfaces EP, Seeing Is Forgetting marks their first collaboration as equal partners. Recorded over just a few nights in Los Angeles, the album is a testament to their near-telepathic intuition. Each moment breathes with unhurried elegance and an emotional depth that stops you in your tracks. Two pop obsessives (Solomon frequently plays with Miley Cyrus, Haim and more), they bring a refracted interpretation of that shared love to Seeing, bridging the worlds of experimental improv and the top 40 with surprising clarity.
The title of Seeing is Forgetting is a reference to the artist Robert Irwin, whose work is a shared inspiration for its “sheer sense of physicality and presence.” The performances on the LP embody that ethos, displaying a honed focus on the minutiae of their interplay, the acoustics of the room and the gradients of harmonic color between Solomon’s woodwinds and Saxl’s synth. Their live show expands on the themes and motifs of the record, bringing a meditative spontaneity to the works. The duo’s innate trust and shared vocabulary allows these pieces to be jumping off points each night, guideposts pointing them on fresh paths to the sublime.