OTTERSON

Description

Diana began work on her latest album, Otterson, during the COVID shutdown. “I was
locked away like pretty much everyone else on the planet. And it was that isolation
that let me go deeper into myself, and then these songs started coming. At the time,
I didn’t understand what they were all about, but a unifying theme emerged – loss.
Loss of a relationship, an animal, self, faith, and a shedding of emotions I had carried
around for years.”

The result is a collection of songs that fold into the listeners psyche with quiet
insistence. Like prayers sung in the dark to a hypnotic melody. Mid-tempo, 1966
influenced sounds lull you in, before stark, Broadway-on-acid numbers completely
disarm you. A few of the songs were written years earlier and re-discovered. “When
my Apollo was in the shop, and the new laptop was also in the shop, I pulled out
some old hard drives and found these lost recordings. I put three that I especially
liked into Logic to see if I could work with them and soon realized that they added
another dimension. They give the album a layer of ghostly eeriness which I love.”
When Diana was in film school at USC, she made a documentary about John. “After
deciding to use John’s painting, I pulled out my film (super 8!) and re-watched it. I
realized how much I have in common with John at this point in my life. I had also
suffered a serious injury in the past ten years, and experienced the loss of both of my
parents, who I’d been caring for. In the film, John says, ‘Painting is a feeling thing. It
has to do with the intensity of your feelings of the world around you. How much
have you been through? Have you lost something dear to you? All these things add
up to make a more intense human being’.
Every song on Otterson is unflinchingly honest, often inspired by nature with all its
wildness, characters wearing facades for faces leading duplicitous lives, stalkers
desperate for love, and sweet dream-like lullabies for the dead.