Delicate, dreamlike, and at times devastating, the sophomore album from Skullcrusher, And Your Song Is Like A Circle, is a daring addition to the contemporary folk canon. She tells Wonderland all about it.
Skullcrusher carries a quiet intensity. The singer-songwriter – Helen Ballentine to those who know her personally – has been developing into one of the most provoking presences in contemporary folk, marking her holistic intentions with a gorgeous debut record, Quiet the Room, back in 2022.
Since the breakthrough, Ballentine has dealt with addiction, disassociation and loss. She returned to Hudson Valley in New York, where she was born and raised, having spent some time situation in LA. She checked into rehab last winter, recovering from the past and envisioning a better future. This journey of reflection and growth form the nucleus of her understated, esoteric sophomore album, And Your Song Is Like A Circle.
It’s one of those records that is bursting with complex emotion, delivered through subtle splashes of vulnerability and tender exploration of self. Sonically, it’s Ballentine’s most progressive and ambitious work, flipping through stripped-down piano and skeletal acoustic guitar balladry, but also grander, cinematic soundscapes that add depth and texture to the album.
Speaking exclusively to Wonderland, the artist reveals the making and meaning behind the track-list.
Listen to And Your Song Is Like A Circle…
Read the track-by-track…
“March”
March is like a confession. It felt like surrendering myself to the things I’ve lost, the things I don’t understand, the confrontation of life & responsibility. While I reflect on things familiar situations take different forms. I make a friend cry as I play them my song, I make them cry because I said something hurtful. There is beauty and terror in the unknown.
“Dragon”
I wrote Dragon while thinking about dissociation and how it can feel to be brought back to the ground from this state. Like in ‘Spirited Away’ when Jihiro begins to disappear in the spirit world she touches Haku’s hand, which pulls her back but then she can’t move her legs. It is a heavy thing to feel the weight of living and pull yourself back to earth. I was interested in the idea of this being a heavy burden but also a necessary aspect of living. It is hopeful but scary as well. Similar to the way armor is a protection but also a burden, either physically or mentally. It’s difficult to protect yourself.
“Living”
One day I was wandering around Brooklyn and I felt like I was watching everything through a window or on a screen. I felt like everyone was moving so fluidly and certainly like moving through a piece of choreography. Living is about being a voyeur, catching a glimpse of brief moments of people’s lives. Like watching a play through a small peep hole, or through the slit of a curtain. I wonder if I am the same. If my life feels a part of this production or if it exists in a small detail somewhere off stage. Perhaps it is not that I was designated a spot off stage, but that if you choose to wander away and take a look it appears that you aren’t moving in synchronicity with others. You start to think too much about your choices and movements and why am I going this way or that way? The fluidity catches for a moment and then you are out of time completely.
“Maelstrom”
I lost a friend.
“March”
surrender
simple but hard
new meaning, double meaning
no singular definition
piano
catharsis
March is about surrender. I’ve had this lyric in my head for years that hasn’t been used but has guided a lot of my other thoughts: “I fall to my knees, press my fingers into the keys.” This is literally what writing March was for me: a physical moment of release. When I’m at my lowest I can return to the solace of sitting at the piano. Possibly like a prayer, I can ritualize moments of despair and recycle them into something else. The beauty that can come from these moments will stay with me alongside the darkness.
“Living”
Much of this album is about disassociation and ‘Living’ focuses on this sensation most specifically. During a period of significant depression I felt very disconnected from my daily routines and the things that, in the past, helped me feel grounded. I would watch others move about their days, shopping, running, walking their dogs, going to work, and feel incredibly aware of how difficult it was for me to be present with myself in these kinds of moments. It is a way to further isolate myself when I settle into this feeling. I am in a dark room as people dance around me.
“Dragon”
I wrote “Dragon” while thinking about a moment from my favorite film, ‘Spirited Away’ by Hayao Miyazaki. The protagonist Chihiro begins to disappear when she crosses into the spirit world. She starts to panic when a mysterious dragon boy, Haku, comes to her, offers her food from the spirit world and holds up his hand for her to touch in order to prove that she is solid once again. She lightly presses her fingers against his palm and finds that she is no longer disappearing. Then, she realizes she can’t move her legs. As if the weight of returning to her physical form is too heavy for her to bear. I thought about this a lot in relation to the process of grounding myself during moments of intense disassociation. I felt a similar kind of heaviness when working to accept responsibility for myself. The choice to come back to yourself is also a burden.
“Maelstrom”
Maelstrom is about losing a friend & the repeating cycles of loss that seem too powerful to overcome. The definition of a Maelstrom is at once fact and myth. As described by Edgar allen Poe in his essay “a descent into the maelstrom”: “The attempts to account for the phenomenon — some of which, I remember, seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal — now wore a very different and unsatisfactory aspect.” The narrator gazes upon the Maelstrom and experiences the disconnect between logic and intuition. “imagine that in the centre of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe…This opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as I gazed, my imagination most readily assented for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid the thunder of the abyss.” Loss can feel this way: like the logical explanation doesn’t intuitively match the enormity of the feeling. Even so, “I wish I’d seen her” feels like a more important admission. Amid the chaos of losing someone, I can come to terms with the ways I could’ve been a better friend. I can accept what I can’t change. I can wonder why.
“Changes”
Changes is the first song I wrote for the album and marks the precipice of a series of transitions in my life. I wrote it while in the midst of a break up & the anticipation of changes that would come. I thought about all the cliche sayings about change, the countless songs with that title, how id heard it all before, but the sentiment holds true always. Change comes, you fall apart, you pick yourself up, you move on. I tried to hold onto the acceptance that I wouldn’t have done anything differently. The start and the end completed the picture of that time in my life. A full circle moment.
“Periphery“
Periphery is a dream of a memory. I would wake up and forget things were different. I would think that someone might be there who I had lost. I can only see you in my dreams. Certain moments I knew I would eventually forget come back to me in dreams. We store these memories of people and places in our subconscious. It seems sweet and sentimental to me and also important. Like cultivating a library of our lives so we can continue to live in these moments.
“Red Car”
I wrote this song while thinking about my time in Los Angeles. I thought about my old car and what it symbolizes to me. I thought about the places I used to park it and how those spaces are still there, taken by others now. I could draw a map in my mind of all the places I’d been and now it feels like some kind of hidden message I left. There could still be a trace of my past life. This connects me to others who are creating those paths now and created them before me. I thought about songs, how they mark periods in time and how they can bring you back to yourself, “I dream a highway” by Gillian Welch surfaced as I thought of LA. I felt so attached to that song in that moment. I also know the song will exist beyond that instance of longing and connect it to countless other experiences and times I will have in the car listening to Gillian.
“Vessel”
I’ve thought a lot about the concept of emptiness in the last few years. The neutrality of emptiness and the possibility of both good & bad filling up space. Connecting these thoughts to experiences of disassociation, I imagined a vessel or container as a relieving entity. Something that can absorb other things easily, take on belief without skepticism, carry another person without being weighed down. Speaking as someone else, taking their words and believing them, going through the motions of a life without question. As in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film “Cure” Mamiya says “All the things that used to be inside me, now they’re all outside. So, I can see all of the things inside you… But the inside of me is empty.”
“The Emptying”
I wrote the emptying after a particularly visceral experience watching Inland Empire by David Lynch. Laura Dern’s character dies on the streets of LA before the camera zooms out slowly and reveals she is on the set of a movie and the scene has just ended. She gets up and walks off set and finds herself in a movie theater where she sees herself on the screen. She watches as her self on screen walks up the stairs and out of sight. She mimics what she has seen and carries out this prediction. I remember watching this from a point up above myself: I fall to my knees and cry and a shadowy shape looms in the corner. I felt so connected to that scene. It is a little weird to think about it now. The feeling of watching yourself, trying to keep up with your own actions. There is something guiding us, some kind of force of intuition that is sometimes exhausting and mysterious and dark. I saw it outside of me I think. I dreamt of a woman who died and created a doppelganger that chased her around. Eventually she stopped running from it and it disappeared. Maybe this is related somehow.
