Estella Jane by Steve Salett

Steve Salett’s last release, as The Poison Tree in 2011, introduced a new chapter in his wide-ranging career: a wise, playful, and newly gentle songwriting voice that felt both fully-formed and ready to deepen and evolve. That evolution, along with everything else in his life, was stopped in its tracks a few months later by the sudden and unexpected loss of his wife, Estella, to breast cancer.

In the immediate aftermath, Salett’s sole focus was on their two young children, and it wasn’t until years later that he felt drawn back to writing songs. He began searching out lyrical ideas wherever he could find them—dreams, a piece written for a grief support group he attended, an old photograph. “The cliche ‘picking up the pieces’ might be the easiest way to describe how I wrote,” he says.

For help gathering these songs—and in a sense himself—together, Salett turned to his friends Patrick Dillett (Sufjan Stevens, David Byrne, Paul Simon) and Thomas Bartlett (St. Vincent, Florence & the Machine, Yoko Ono), and together they obsessively whittled and sanded and burned until the songs were reduced to their essence: deeply, inescapably personal, but also deeply strange, grappling fiercely with grief, and always at an angle. Salett’s voice emerges here darker than before, dizzying in range from a deep, impossibly rich baritone to a feather-light falsetto.

After finishing these recordings, nearly 7 years ago, Salett found that he wasn’t yet ready to release them in any traditional sense. He says “I put the songs onto mini iPods, and into little linen bags I sewed, with a blank page from one of Estella’s diaries. I made 5 of them, and gave them away on the 5th anniversary of her death. I didn’t know how to share these songs, and I still don’t, but I hope they have something to offer. Grief is universal, and I know that more now. I hope the songs don’t just reflect sadness (they are sad, yes), but also connect to the joy and the love that surrounded me and surrounds me still.”

Steve Salett is a song-writer, producer, and musical advisor whose work has been praised as “Picturesque songs about the broken-hearted” (BrooklynVegan). From early work in The Kelley Deal 6000 and Deformo to the pop stylings of The King of France and heartbreak of The Poison Tree, Salett has honed a songwriting craft steeped in authenticity.