Mood Board is a column where artists share a few of the things that inspired their new record. This time, Accessory — aka, the Chicago-based artist Jason Balla, also of Dehd and Earring — tells us how his mom’s piano, Miles Davis, Astrid Sonne, and more inspired his debut record Dust, out today.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
1. The Piano
When my mom passed away she left me a piano. It was sitting in storage for a few years until I moved into a first floor apartment. Mornings writing on the piano became a ritual during the writing of Dust and turned into a way to reflect on my mom’s memory. The instrument itself really offered me a new approach to songwriting guiding me towards rhythms and chord progressions I just wouldn’t have done on a guitar. It’s such a dramatic instrument and one of the challenges of this record was figuring out how to incorporate it into my style in a way that felt true.
2. Miles Davis “In A Silent Way” from In a Silent Way
When my friend Matt first played me this album it was a time-stands-still kind of moment. The record came out in 1969, but the tone and the playing of the guitar feels so relevant and modern even today. It’s so expressive in a way that suspends time, inching through this beautiful mood. Today there’s this pressure to keep up with people’s shorter attention spans, but this proves how compelling just living in the moment can be when the music’s played with heart.
3. Bill Callahan “What Comes After Certainty” from Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest
I am just so struck by the lyrics of this song. “True love is not magic/It’s certainty/And what comes after certainty.” In just a few lines he rejects the common trope of love in popular culture and offers a wiser alternative. It really spoke to me and where I was at on my own personal journey with understanding love and how it works in my life. With Dust I tried to bottle up moments of clarity and insight and pushed myself to write from a more vulnerable place where each word holds weight.
4. Sam Wilkes’s “Descending” from Wilkes
Sam Wilkes’s whole catalog is inspiring to me for its sense of adventure, variety and rhythmic sensibility, but this song is a world unto itself. I love the way the vocals sound, so dreamy and beyond. The bass and drums stumble endlessly forward into a mist below. Apple music will just loop songs and I’ve caught myself listening to this on repeat 10, 20 times. The idea that you can live within a song is something I really aimed for on Dust.
5. Astrid Sonne (Live at Co-Prospherity Sphere)
I saw Astrid Sonne perform in 2024 at a really great space here in Chicago called the Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was a master class in minimalism and intention, moving from string duets to pop vocals over beats to pure electronic manipulation of prerecorded compositions. Each act was carried out with quiet confidence and such purpose. She made the room silent. The variety felt dynamic, almost collage-like or sculptural in a way that felt exciting and new to me and I think this challenged my own way of thinking about arrangement. It became a fun game of putting together more disparate sounds and finding the throughline to unite them.
