Nashville-based indie-folk singer-songwriter Alicia Blue has released her new single “Saline Waters“, taken from her upcoming EP, Inner Child Work out July 15th. The track, which is a dark reflection of 2021, the second year of the pandemic, can be heard now below.
Alicia explained that the song is about facing mortality and is like a “darker and more aggressive take on Joni Mitchell’s’ classic ‘Circle Game.’ It’s essentially a tender message about what is seemingly the least tender thing we all must one day face, meaning death. I was now beginning my own year of magical thinking, having lost three people in a span of 12 months. I found myself with my best friend taking a drive down to Salton Sea on New Year’s Day. It’s a dead sea without a living thing spared and it fascinated me.”
The Salton Sea was a place where Alicia found herself exploring her own personal comfort in greif. “Too much of something caused this, and that was salt. The white sand was rough beneath our feet, until we looked closer and realized it wasn’t sand at all,” she explains, drawing a metaphor with the Salton Sea surroundings and the sense of loss that surrounded her at the time. “It was billions of fragmented fish bones, sea life that once was… skeletons for sand. There was a strange thing that happened that inspired ‘Saline Waters.’ There was a friendliness in the space. I found some comfort there, at Salton Sea, where everything is dead, but just is as it is…and it’s all very beautiful,” she says.
The former Los Angeles native found herself working with Nashville-based songwriter and producer Lincoln Parish, originally of the band Cage the Elephant. Parish helped to provide a solid musical foundation for her songs—including some new guitar progressions, textures, and riffs—so she could focus on doing her best, most creative writing work to date. Inner Child Work finds her grappling with some long-overdue emotional reckonings.
“I didn’t grow up with any faith or trust in what you might call self-help or anything like that,” she says. “I got my first therapist a few years ago and realized there were things holding me back from doing what I wanted with my life. Things like anxiety, depression—I just had no language to describe them previously, so there was no way to deal with their existence.”