Premiere: Erin Ash Sullivan soars into the mid-day sun with ‘Rest Stop Bird’

Erin Ash Sullivan‘s voice is as feathered as a robin’s sweet-folded wings. With “Rest Stop Bird,” Sullivan glides in the air with a supple lead vocal that almost lulls you to sleep. But her words are like thorns puncturing the skin. The heaviness seeps from her lungs, as she longs for a relationship that’s long dead.

“She’ll serenade you as you’re leaving town / Hear the notes rise up as the sun goes down, down, down,” she sings, unpacked a quaking, emotional turn. “Sometimes leaving doesn’t need a word / Just listen to the song of the rest stop bird.”

The lyrics heave and sigh in time with the song’s rustic underpinnings. Scattered strings and the pitter-patter of percussion echo in dark shadows around Sullivan, who seems to be standing in the eye of a gentle summer storm. “We hear a lot of breakup stories where one part of the couple wishes they were still together,” the singer-songwriter explains to B-Sides & Badlands about the song’s thematic strings.

In writing the song, she “wanted to capture how a mutual breakup has its own special kind of sadness: it’s a different shade of blue when one person initiates the breakup and the other person simply doesn’t care.”

“Little bird don’t care that he don’t care / That you took off without warning / Little bird don’t care that he don’t care / That you’ll be gone come morning,” she sings later. Sullivan’s performance is a dazzling and fluttering one – one that’ll root itself in your soul before the song is over.

Out of Massachusetts, she navigates reedy folk music with a keen eye and an unwavering hand. She’s much like a seasoned seamstress who knows the weight of words and how to make them cut deep.

“Rest Stop Bird” samples a forthcoming album, titled Signposts and Marks, out everywhere on July 26.

Listen to “Rest Stop Bird” below.

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