Unfulfilled longing may be one of the greatest inspirations in human history.
There’s Odysseus, wandering desperately for a decade as he tries to return home after the 12th-century BC Trojan War. There’s Lord Byron, whose romantic protagonists flung themselves across Europe in an eternal frenzy. There’s Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who swore it was “the longing that matters” in his restless interpretations of Bach. Hell, even British author A. A. Milne had his most famous character, Winnie-the-Pooh, savor the anticipation of eating honey more than actually tasting it.
Skylar Gudasz crafts a similar sense of timeless desire on Country, a new album from the Durham-based songwriter out August 9 on her own label, Perseids Records. Nine intimate slices of indie rock, modern folk, and symphonic pop blur the boundaries between sky and earth, water and land, hidden pain and extroverted smile.
Lead singles “Fire Country” and “Truck” capture Southern-fried lightning in a bottle, while deeper cuts “Watercolor” and “Lovestorypastlife” chart the contours of human failure and natural calamity over crunchy guitars. But all of Country is grounded in Gudasz’s voice, which floats effortlessly between registers—whisper-thin at times, hauntingly resonant at others.
After proving herself in the mid-2010s with Big Star’s Third, a series of concert tributes to the band, and 2020 breakthrough album Cinema, Gudasz is now a decade deep into crafting her own cosmology.
Equal parts theatrical and earthy, Renaissance ideals crash into apocalyptic weather as Country’s songs shift seamlessly between tactile sensation and heady introspection. On the catchy chorus of “Truck,” Gudasz embodies the vibe perfectly, flipping between first- and third-person perspectives: “What you looking for out there girl? / Wild as anything, I believe in everything.”
That hopefulness springs eternal for Gudasz.
“Despair is a luxury,” she tells the INDY on a hike in June to see hundreds of herons roosting along Ellerbe Creek in East Durham. “Who is it in service of for us to not have hope? Usually, it’s the powers that be.”
Under a warm breeze and summer swarms of bugs, Gudasz details her Quaker upbringing in an artistic, activist family, bouncing between literary annotations of her work and self-effacing jokes about working musician struggles. On Country and in conversation, she also wrestles eagerly with difficult questions about human agency and social justice.
“People say, ‘Well, we created climate change, so we deserve whatever extinction is coming for us,’” she says, watching as herons take off and land. “That’s cynicism, and I don’t think we deserve that. We were born into this crisis.”
It’s a crisis Gudasz understands well. In Los Angeles, she knows she’s in “Fire Country”; on “Australia,” she laments a “borrowed country” ruined in the titular song by both a rich man’s arrogant hospitality and the island’s recent cataclysmic wildfires. On “Atoll,” she unpacks the devastation wrought in the South Pacific after World War II.
Stumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole while brainstorming ideas for Country, Gudasz was shocked to discover 1940s films created by the U.S. military. In these propaganda films, Bikini Atoll natives willingly abandon their home island so the military can test out hydrogen bombs and their subsequent nuclear fallout.
“It’s incredibly chilling because these U.S. military officers were creating a theater of war by asking the island chiefs, ‘Do you want to do something good for mankind?’” Gudasz remembers. “It just totally fucked with me and the song came fully formed, as is—I wrote it in an afternoon.”
Gudasz says that kind of songwriting compulsion has been a hallmark of her artistic process for years. Counterintuitively, many of the global stories told on Country were written during the first two years of the pandemic, when travel wasn’t possible.
“I think my nervous system was catching up with the past few years of adventures I’d had in life,” she says. “That’s the magic of songwriting—things come out in a way you can’t really understand until later. Maybe your body has knowledge of things that your brain isn’t quite ready to conceptualize.”
That sense of place is deepened on the album’s final song, “No Body,” a baroque reflection of the maritime isolation of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. “Home is the shoreline,” she sings, before defying many of the misogynistic morals ingrained in epics like The Odyssey: “I am not the wife / I will not be waiting / I am not the woman / Confined to the island.”
That celebration of modern womanhood extends to “Outlaw” and “Mother’s Daughter.” On the former, Gudasz’s sharp lyrical focus is trained on a friend who makes the bold choice to upend her life in pursuit of an artistic career. Laid over psychedelic mellotron and pop grooves from coproducer and close friend Ari Picker, it forms a one-two punch with “Mother’s Daughter,” another dissection of authority, gender, identity, and perspective.
But neither song is a stiff thesis statement: stylistically different, they both take corporeal pleasure in “swim[ing] naked with me ’neath the stars” and “colt legs in a cotton dress.” She credits the exquisite sonic palette of Country to collaborators like Picker and Jeff Crawford, who helped her record the album at their respective studios in Pittsboro and Chapel Hill, along with current bandmates Casey Toll, Chessa Rich, Matt O’Connell, and Nick Jaeger.
Also facilitating that creative flow: an old turquoise Epiphone Wildcat guitar she dug out of her parents’ closet on a trip home to see her parents in Virginia. Gudasz remembers her brother, Jason, teaching her how to play it as a kid.
“That guitar had all of this nostalgia built into it,” she says, staring off into the distance toward the kind of power lines she grew up near but wasn’t allowed to play under. “It was tied to that time and place in my life—people and feelings and surroundings. It sounds kind of woo-woo, but different instruments come with their own energy—and different places lead to their own songs.”
Musing on the multiple layers of meaning loosely tied into Country, she lands on nature as an anchor.
“During the pandemic, there was an instinctual move to be more tied to nature,” she says. “All those other things we’d created for ourselves in society had broken down. But we are nature, too. We can’t be distant from it. Before we were human, we were like fish—and at a certain point, we crawled out of the ocean.”
At this point in the conversation, it’s clear that Gudasz is operating on a more cerebral plane than your average working musician. Hopscotching across her artistic multitudes—collaborating with the writer Colleen Pesci on the zine Day Job Press, filming a suite of high-concept music videos for most of Country’s singles, performing at New York City’s West Side Fest in a play about the High Line public park—she credits artists like Mary Oliver, Gillian Welch, and Caroline Polachek as inspiration.
“Working in multiple mediums allows me to follow the impulse to create,” Gudasz says. “Writing songs is how I make sense of the world, but sometimes other things feel inspiring and intuitive.”
For Country, that expression came through in the visual identity of the album. While shooting a music video for “Lovestorypastlife” at the Chicacomico Life-Saving Station in Rodanthe with collaborators Cameron Law and Sandra Davidson, the trio captured the drill team performing historical reenactments in the ocean. Sifting through still images after the fact, they landed on one reminiscent of painter Andrew Wyeth and his depiction of the movement of bodies.
“It has that epic timelessness to it,” Gudasz says. “There’s so much longing present when you look at the ocean. It’s inherent to the human experience, even though it’s unplaced—like, ‘What am I longing for?’ Maybe it’s a longing you feel for home. But does that longing go away when you find a home, or return home? I don’t know if I have an answer to that.”
This leads into a discussion of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who composed a series of sonnets about The Odyssey. One stanza marvels at Odysseus, the man who “in his exile wandered night and day / over the world like a wild dog.”
But in her artistic optimism, Gudasz sees that mythology as overly serious. Can’t our modern journeys be more enjoyable and less despairing? Philosophical, sure, but also pleasurable?
“It all comes from a place of playfulness and joy,” she says as we near the end of our hike. “How do we as humans go forward in our humanity, riding the waves of these changes that are inevitable?”
When asked to sum up the vibe of Country, she laughs, closes her eyes, then delivers: “It’s a summer record about time and power: the power of nature, of the ocean, of fire, of things that humans can’t control. Country as a concept of the land and the earth is not actually ownable. Maybe we can find a sort of freedom in that instead of just being frightened by it.”
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