Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
The Impermanent Amber is the third full-length from New York’s Secret Gardens, the project of Greg Almeida, which means it’s also the third in a cycle of LPs meant to represent each of the seasons, with 2021’s Tundra being the winter installment and 2022’s everbloom being spring (the Verao EP in 2019 was the summer release). The Impermanent Amber is Secret Gardens’ attempt to capture the sounds of fall, and as such it is appropriately the sound of a band in transition.
Tundra and everbloom dealt, generally, in lush post-rock and tended to eschew vocals; when they did appear, they were hardly a distraction from the dizzying guitar work on display. The Impermanent Amber foregrounds Almeida’s voice–and what a voice it is–as well as a host of guest vocalists. Appropriately, it also casts a wider net, sonically, than any Secret Gardens project before it. There’s heavy, head-spinning instrumental prog (“Skyisland,” “The Crisp”), breathy emo-pop (“Persimmon,” “Pleasant Valley/Miner Field”), triumphant and shimmery big-tent indie rock (“Rumination,” “MT”), technical and bruising post-hardcore (“The Coven”), and more. It’s a gamble to try out so many disparate styles, particularly genres so opposed to what Secret Gardens was doing previously, but that makes The Impermanent Amber all the more impressive.
Almeida spoke with The Alternative to break down the writing of every single song on the album, delving deep into his musical influences, the roles of his collaborators and the experiences that shaped what would become The Impermanent Amber. Read that below, and be sure to stream the record while you do.
“I Let Myself Die”
Weirdly enough, this is the only Secret Gardens song I did not write. Some odd years ago, I was hanging out with my best friend Charlie who I’m in another band with (Here’s To You), and he showed me this short, eloquent song that he wrote on acoustic, in this incredibly beautiful alternate guitar tuning. I was breathless for a moment. He told me after he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, as he doesn’t have a solo project that fit with it sonically, and the song sat for a few years. I knew deep in my heart one day that this could be the genesis of the autumn record, or have some involvement with it.
I love when albums have good opening tracks that sort of act like a mission statement for what’s to come. It can be a very thin line between being its own track or just feeling like an intro, I wanted this song to walk between that line very gently. A short song that tells a very simple, open-to-interpretation story, but just acoustic instruments and a vocal. Sonically I felt like this was the right way to go and it was a good preamble for the insane moments that followed it on the record, and all its twists and turns.
Charlie and I are so happy with how it turned out. I think it accomplished its goal perfectly as a song, and I am so stoked that he was down to let me include it on the record. The open tuning that this song is in is the same tuning/key as the next track, which I wrote after he showed me this tuning, so I have a lot to thank Charlie for.
“Rumination”
If the previous track is the overture, this track is what I would consider to be the first fully realized idea of what Autumn sounds like to me, and my interpretation of it. The ebbs and flows of weird time signatures/time feels, but all meshing together over something completely organic and pretty sounding. Real piano, real strings, acoustic guitar, and just the right chords to give you that chilly feeling. I wanted to encapsulate a lot of feelings on this record, but lyrically, on this one I wanted to capture the feeling of my depression and how it radiates through me at various points in my life. And how, as time pushes forward, I still dwell on things as a result of it, it affects my life in various other ways, and I wonder what I can do, if anything, to improve it. It’s a struggle I have dealt with a lot in the past 5 years of my life, and especially the last year. Lyrically it is a short couple passages, but I wanted that to be the only thing to digest. I tried very hard to be intentional with what I say on this record, and HOW much I say. There’s obviously such a thing as too many words in a song but there’s also “too much coverage of words” in a song, in my opinion. The canvas only needs to have one color for so long.
Also, this is one of the most bat-shit songs to understand musically (even though it doesn’t sound that way and sounds really pretty), it’s really hard to play–let alone play and sing. Trying to play this to a click is nuts, haha.
“Persimmon” (with Ella Meadows of Transit)
I love Transit. I love Ella. Her work in that band is half of the reason I even know how or WANTED to make a record that sounds like autumn. Listen & Forgive is a pivotal album for me–and I only associate it with October days spent driving through the northeast. A long time ago, an old bandmate showed me a version of a DADGAD tuning (EADGAD actually), I was messing around with that tuning and stumbled into this riff. I’ve known I wanted to use it since, like, 2020. Only in 2023 did I finally take the time to develop it musically, and when Ella said she was down to write over it, I was so so excited to see where it would go. Ella ended up pulling up old leftover lyrics from the Transit era and ended up repurposing some of them for this, which I thought was super cool.
For the music video we had an intense middle-of-nowhere Airbnb Halloween party shoot in the end of July, and then color corrected the leaves to be orange instead of green. That was really ambitious and nuts to do but we got it done, thankfully.
One of my favorite things about this song is the ending beat switch up ending, it almost goes to like an Irish jig sounding breakdown. Super weird, super not something I have done before, but I’m super into it. I’ve been liking the whole “beat switch up” thing in music a lot more musically–not in the same world, but Knocked Loose does that a lot and I just think it’s really sick. So I drew a little inspiration there.
“Skyisland”
You like Zelda prog, son? That’s basically what I tried to do here. Don’t sue me Nintendo!
No but really, definitely was inspired by Tears of the Kingdom in the last year or so, what a breathtaking soundtrack. In that game you can go high up into the sky on these floating islands, and the trees there are CONSISTENTLY red/auburn/amber colored, it’s like permanently autumn up there. Which I think is really cool so I had to draw inspiration from what musically goes on up there and make it my own. In the studio when writing this with Joe Arrington, we kind of took a lot of ideas and ran with them. I had this melody in 9/4, guitar parts in 5/4, and other random stuff that I wanted to throw in the song, it somehow ended up working with the groove ideas he had. I was so stoked about it. Then once the song got to a breaking point, we decided to just go full djent because, why not? It’s something I never got to do before in any of my tracks, so I thought it could be a really fun exploration of the genre. I really like when djenty type of metalcore stuff also sounds pretty too (think Spiritbox’s “Constance” for example).
“MT”
In 2021, my partner and I spent a summer working at a national park in Montana. For one reason after another that I could write an entire book about, this ended up being an incredibly pivotal and important time period in my life. We learned a lot, we saw a lot, we just lived a lot of life in one summer. I still reference the experience on a daily basis, and I still have things to say about it even years later. I found myself associating every autumn I’ve had with a “return to home after long adventure” feeling since then, and the reflection on it all–summarized by the age old saying that “this too shall pass.” Everything that comes your way, every experience, every deep conversation and memory, it will eventually leave and, whether you like it or not, bring way to something new. You can truly never stop September and that nostalgic, bittersweet, sadness mixed with total joy is what this song is trying to capture. I think I did a pretty good job with it, with credit to the fact that it’s just such a personal topic to me. Hard to not spill my guts on this one, ya know?
Viana Valentine, one of my best friends in the entire world, features on this song. She is an incredible singer, used to be my roommate–my sister for life. During that summer she actually visited us in Montana, so she is the only person in the world other than my partner Holly who could relate to this experience and what I saw there, so it was an honor to write this one with both of them. Happy tears all around!
“Pleasant Valley/Milner Field” (with Cory Wells)
I guess I did a good job sequencing this album because this next track picks up years later on an experience that was also just as fleeting but very enjoyable–moving out of my dad’s house into the first place I chose to live on my own, with one of my best friends in the world, and then having to leave that place. For a few logistical reasons, it was destined to be a short experience because I was soon after going to move in with my partner. Obviously that’s a much different dynamic in an amazing way, but I think I just wanted to write something to memorialize that brief but awesome period in my life where I was living with a close friend and it just felt like one big party/hang out session all the time. Musically, I was pretty inspired by American Football, Sweet Pill, etc., on this one.
Cory Wells was the only person I had in mind when making this track, his voice fits perfectly on this type of stuff even though he is primarily an acoustic artist. It just has that really awesome way of cutting though, especially when screaming. So glad he was down to get together with me when I was in LA doing some shows with A Lot Like Birds. Great guy, good hangs.
“The Crisp”
One of my underdog favorites from the record! So far, this seems to be getting a great response when I totally anticipated it to be glossed over and mesh in with the rest of the track list. But it seems to have stood out and for that I’m grateful.
I’ve been touring with mostly the same live lineup for the past couple years–Joe DeGregory, Reese Ortenberg, and Jarryd Razak. Those guys are brothers to me, so I thought it would be cool when approaching this new record to try and write a song completely from scratch with them. One day I was on tour working for an irish folk band, and one of the members had their guitar tuned to DADGAD, something I don’t normally mess with. The intro riff was something I came up with one day on a whim and it caught me by surprise cause it was again in a time feel and groove I wasn’t used to playing in. I sent a quick clip to the guys and as soon as I got back we fleshed it out a bit more, demoing out some stuff where we rehearse. I took it home and worked on it a bit more, especially that drawn out middle section where the energy comes down. I wanted that to be sort of a callback to my song “Lighthouse” which has a similar section, but this time take it in a new direction. That’s where the flugelhorn solo came in–our friend Michael Golub crushed that shit. And the end is just a ton of epic fuckery–something I deeply enjoy being able to do with this project. 10/10 would do again! The guys killed it.
“The Mule”
I wondered for a while what people would think about this song. I have no idea how it exists. One summer day after being on a Sufjan Stevens kick I just woke up and this entire song came out of me. Like, literally just poured out. So much so that all the demo vocals I laid down on it are the ones I kept on the record. I literally re-recorded and re-comped vocals over this entire song when tracking and it was just… not the vibe. I’m still really happy with my decision to do that. I think this is the fastest I’ve ever made a Secret Gardens song. I also think it’s some of my better work lyrically.
I don’t think it needs an entire dissertation but, this song tells my story and a few of my experiences while spending weeks backpacking on The Long Trail in Vermont with a friend of mine in the fall of 2022. We met some characters on trail, although, not as many as we would have in the summertime. One of them was this older gentleman we hung out with for a few days, and we never got his name, only his trail name: The Mule. We sat by the fire and in lean-tos and told each other a few stories over the course of a few days. We wished each other well. It was cold, and pretty desolate on trail by that time, so we kind of had nothing else to do but bond and share wisdom. Something about that experience felt so pivotal, and I’ve been meaning to write a song that reflects on this time for years. So yeah, I guess it makes sense that it all just poured out.
“The Upper Peninsula”
I don’t have as much to say about this song lyrically because it is the one cover song on the record–but I will say that the first time I heard this track on Sufjan’s Michigan record, I was totally enamored. I thought to myself, “holy shit, this is exactly what fall could sound like,” in a similar way I did to the first track, but I ALSO heard so much room for potential, and room to expand upon the original with the Secret Gardens post-rock type sound. That perfect blend of circumstances made me decide to throw it on the record. I also really like when a band covers a song on a record that you almost wouldn’t think is a cover, and then finding out that it is one day down the line is just a cool piece of lore.
The original song has a female vocalist on the harmonies with Sufjan, so I thought it would be perfect to finally work with my friend Lisette Lowe on this as we have been friends for years. She crushed it as always, really really excited how this song fit with my voice too–I feel like it’s harder to make things work with my vocal range sometimes.
“The Coven” (with Greybloom)
I have no idea who knows this or not but, prior to SG, I was in a fairly serious band that was touring regionally and trying really hard to “make it.” That band went on an indefinite hiatus pretty much at the start of the pandemic, and this song was an instrumental I’d written for a track we never used, that I always thought had an INCREDIBLE amount of potential.
It’s a shame we never kept working on it but I’m honestly very happy with how things happened, because this form of it I believe is truly realized. I scrapped all but the parts I had come up with on my own, took it to the writers room with Joe Arrington, re-wrote the song and voila. From the get go, I knew I wanted my besties in Greybloom to do the vocals for it/contribute some guitar. We are very musically aligned in a ton of ways so I knew this would be an instant banger. We went through a few iterations of vocals and lyrics and eventually spent a few days in Dallas tracking the final vox and it was just an incredible experience. I like having one heavy song on each record so this definitely served that purpose. Heavy music is a big part of who I am so I’m really happy Secret Gardens can be an avenue for that when I want it to be.
“a tragic tale of stars”
It’s still hard for me to muster up the words to explain this song. To put it briefly: musically I had the idea for this song on that same Long Trail hike in 2022, but I pretty much stored it mentally for two years until I could get in a room with Joe Arrington to write. I knew having someone else to bounce some ideas off of would do this song correctly.
It’s almost like my musical brain had some sort of foreshadowing because in 2022, nothing too bad was going on personally in my life, yet this small idea of music I had was really sad, drenched in something I could not explain. In 2023 my life took a couple pretty drastic turns for the worse, one of them being a very close friend of mine being diagnosed with a rare cancer at the very young age of 36. This may trigger some so be cautious reading further–watching him decay over the next eight months or so was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through thus far in life. I watched someone I considered an extension of my family go from spry and chipper, able to hang like the rest of us, to being practically unable to speak or move, resembling a 90+ year old man, right before my eyes. Completely bedridden in just a few months. Someone who is only six years older than me. My peer, who felt like a brother to me. I still can’t believe it to this day. I wrote this song as a soundtrack for me and my friend circle’s grief during this time. It’s a sadness I can’t really explain in words, just in what i’ve written in this song about being there for those last few moments. If you’re reading, thank you for getting this far, and I hope that you never have to deal with something like this as long as you live. This track ends the cycle, and fades out with audio from “Tough Conversations” off the winter record Tundra. And the cycle begins again.
The Impermanent Amber is out now.
—
Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison
The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch.