Mood Board is our column where artists share a few of the things that inspired their new record. This time, the LA-based folk artist Sari Lightman (of The Lightman Sisters) tells us how Eve Babitz, the Holiday Inn in Encinitas, Big Foot, and more inspired her solo debut The Way I Saw You — out now on Night Bloom Records.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
1. Eve Babitz
I read Slow Days, Fast Company and became a devoted admirer of Babitz’s work, along with the sensual, vibrant Los Angeles landscape she portrayed. The events of her later years are less discussed; she grappled with recovery after an accident left her scarred and disfigured. I wanted to write “The Way I Saw You” from this perspective — after the accolades and the beauty is gone. Not leaning into tragedy but the artist’s mythology and peeling back the glossy layers to inspect the quieter, eroding interior.
2. Room 222 at Holiday Inn Express, Encinitas
My partner Riley is from Encinitas, California — a former funky surf town now inundated with remote tech wealth and pilates. He always points out a motel that has since swapped chain names, but where a few leftover members of the Heaven's Gate cult who missed out on the mass "exit" in Rancho Sante Fe decided to join the rest of the group on the spaceship by ending their lives. The cult mindset especially with the fringes of sad consumerism — the black Nikes and the Holiday Inn Express — I found fascinating. I'm also a a big numerical admirer of 222. I wrote about the Heaven's Gate compound in the song “The Prize.”
3. Big Foot
I’ve always been fascinated and scared of Big Foot. My recurring childhood nightmare involved the family friendly film adaptation Harry and the Hendersons with John Lithgow. In my nightmare, Big Foot inevitably finds my hiding spot and I get eaten. When thinking of an album cover, I wanted to recreate the classic Big Foot image but a feminine one. Being beastly, gross, sensual felt more interesting to me than vying for beauty.
4. Nova Scotia
I lived in Halifax in my adolescent years where my twin sister and I began playing shows while simultaneously learning how to play our instruments. Mercifully, this was a pre-mass social media era. I remember long days with absolutely nothing to do but look out my window to the harbor, feeling perpetually lonely, writing tiny sincere songs. I’m always trying to get back there — not to the self-indulgent malaise, but the feeling of writing with no afterthought of where these songs will land.
5. The spirit of Anne Briggs
I discovered Anne Briggs while touring the UK with my sister. Some guy in Brighton who ran a record store took out a dusty VHS player and showed us this documentary of the folk revivalists of the ‘60s. Apparently, Anne would travel to shows by horse drawn carriage and swim out to the seals and miss half her gigs. This is the spirit I want to embody as a musician.
