Interview: Holy Nowhere steps outside of himself with his ‘Soft Return’ album

A panic attack ripped through his body, and he wasn’t totally sure where it came from. It was the week of Christmas 2021, and he was lying in bed. All of a sudden he “felt a disturbance or a collapse in my sense of self, an inability to distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not me,'” says Steve Sachs, known as Holy Nowhere.

Panic quickly set in, but the lines were so blurred that he didn’t know exactly what was happening. “I couldn’t tell if the panic caused the disturbance or if the disturbance caused the panic,” he continues, mulling over his answer. “And then there was an additional layer of terror because I also felt like there was something true about it like it was closer to reality than the way I usually experience the world.”

“I thought I lost my mind, which is probably what anyone reading this thinks, too. And if they don’t yet, they probably will by the end of this,” he adds.

With his new album, Soft Return, Sachs presses pause on his life in an effort to understand what happened and how it relates to everyone around him. Of course, he had to find his footing first before setting about writing the album’s eight tracks.

“I was afraid it might happen out of nowhere again, and it took some time for that to subside. I’ve only been able to make sense of it by giving up trying to make sense of it. Not-knowing,” he explains. “I’ve always suffered from existential angst, and I imagine I always will. It shows up in most, if not all, of the songs on this record, usually in the form of an attempt to connect, to make contact, to get an answer or find some closure, and finding that it’s simply not possible.”

As far as putting his revelatory musing down on paper, the bouncy, guitar-tearing “Infinite Mirror” came first, “shortly after that experience, maybe a week later,” he says. “I tried to capture some of what was going through my mind at the time. I felt like the part and the whole—me and the universe—were exact reflections of each other, and I was terrified that my actions and thoughts would affect everything else. I know that doesn’t exactly make sense, but that’s how it felt.”

Soft Return, produced by another blog favorite Dana Why, emits radiation in the form of cosmic stretches of musical adeptness, almost as though a chameleon incarnate. Sach holds up a mirror to the world in the hopes of provoking the listener to find some semblance of self, craggy remnants cracked and bleeding from their own life-altering experiences. His panic attack feeds the set’s many setpieces, laying the groundwork for a much-needed transformation. Even though it’s not about him, it does leech off his veins.

While he never found catharsis in making the record, it now exists as a snapshot of life, forever immortalized on record. “I’m skeptical of anyone that says making art helps them feel better. I’ve never met a fellow artist who felt satisfied with their work, who wasn’t jealous of their peers, or who felt understood by their audience,” he says. “Making art mostly makes people feel worse. And I’m no different. I’ll grant that something indescribably special happens in the moment of creation, but making art has never helped me feel better about anything.”

Soft Return enters the world this Thursday (December 7). Pre-save here.

Below, Steve Sachs speaks about his song “Save You,” fate, country music, and lessons learned from Dana Why.

In “Save You,” you sing, “Everything just happens / for no reason at all.” Do you believe that? Do you believe there isn’t some cosmic design for our lives? And what about fate?

Here’s what I think: There are infinite ways to chop up reality using words and concepts, and some ways are more useful than others, but that doesn’t make any of them ultimately true. “Fate” and “cosmic design,” like all words and concepts, are relative—“this” as opposed to “that.” But reality is not relative to anything, so it can’t be described in relative terms. We get closer to the truth by removing words and concepts. What’s left when we do? Well, it can’t be nothing, because nothing is relative to something. “Everything just happens / for no reason at all” — even saying that is saying too much.

For the video, what led to your creative decisions?

I’ve been collaborating with filmmaker Tommy Butler on various projects for the last 15 years. When I sent him the full record, he sent back a lovely email with detailed thoughts on every track and said he wanted to do a video for “Save You.” I’m still blown away by how effortlessly he made the connection between these two disparate things—these chaotic images of people chasing cheese down a hill (!) and the ideas expressed in my song.

I have a country music background, and I couldn’t help but think about the genre when listening to “Unreasonable Me.” The guitar work feels dusty like what’s used in country & western music. Even the melody feels country. Was that the intention?

Absolutely. My wife and I got pretty deep into country music in 2022. We watched the 16-hour Ken Burns documentary on the history of country music and even spent a week in Nashville. I wrote somewhere between eight and 10 country songs over the past couple years, in addition to the songs that made this record. “Unreasonable Me” is one that felt thematically relevant to the rest of “Soft Return” so I decided to include it. I started writing it in the car while I was driving one night. The title popped into my head, and I could see exactly how the song would go. I finished it the next day. I was playing it as a very traditional 1940s-style country song, but Dana added some style to it and disguised the traditionalism pretty nicely.

“Wailing Loon” is one of the more somber pieces with what almost sounds like organ in the background. How did this one come together, musically?

It’s nice to discuss “Wailing Loon” after the question on country music because the song is, in part, a response to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams. In that song, Hank talks about robins weeping and birds that sound too blue to fly—I took that and thought, yeah, and here’s why they cry, here’s what they’re trying to say. My intention was to have it work on two levels. From one perspective, the song is a lament for an unrequited lover. From another, it’s a cry into the void, an unanswered plea to someone or something beyond, and an expression of the yearning to connect with whatever might be out there. Musically, we built it around my guitar, but I wanted to retain that sense of being out in nature on one of those long summer nights. The organ and some extra reverb helped us do that.

With “Just a Memory,” you sing, “I don’t want to face the fact that you’re not coming back / I pretend that I’m strong but I’m crying.” Did it take writing the song to get over your pain? And do you still feel the sting sometimes?

I don’t really subscribe to the idea that the job of the artist is to reveal emotional truths about themselves in their work. I’m more interested in ideas than feelings, and I’m more interested in the universal than the personal. So “Just a Memory” is not about my loss. It’s about Loss. And in the same way, “Save You” or “Wailing Loon” or “Infinite Mirror” aren’t about my existential angst. They’re about Existential Angst. If you listen to these songs and you’re thinking about me, I fucked up. If I did my job, you’re thinking about you.

What’s it about songwriting that allows you to confront those parts of yourself?

In my experience, a good idea isn’t something that comes from you, it’s something that happens to you—or maybe it happens through you—so the trick is to get out of your own way and allow it to happen. What I’m trying to do when I make music is completely forget that I exist. Once in a while, I’m able to do that, but usually, I have to intentionally finish whatever was started intuitively, and the song suffers as a result. What songwriting forces me to confront is the fact that “myself” is the problem. The less “myself” is involved in the creative process the better. And that’s valuable to confront because it remains true outside the context of music. It’s true for life, in general.

What did you learn from Dana?

Trust, primarily. I’ve played in bands, so I’m familiar with how collaboration works, but I’ve never handed over so much control to just one other person. In a group, you weigh multiple perspectives on everything, and there’s a democratizing effect. With these songs, Dana was my sole collaborator, and we didn’t always agree. In those moments, I had to trust his vision. I hope he feels that I did that enough in the process. I cannot overstate how much life he brought to these songs. A lot of people talk a big game, but they’re full of shit. Dana humbly delivers absolute heaters with uncanny consistency. He’s the real deal.

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