It’s been a pretty remarkable year for Massachusetts indie psych-folk band Quilt. In February, they released one of the finest albums of 2016 in Plaza, a record sparked by early singles like “Eliot St.” and “Roller” and a beautifully enhanced release party at the Museum of Fine Arts. Plaza has caught the attention of those around the world, and after an impressive touring schedule that included a recent stop at Firefly Music Festival, Quilt return home for a show tonight at the Sinclair in Cambridge with Brooklyn’s Widowspeak and fellow New England product Doug Tuttle.
Incredibly, Plaza shows no signs of slowing down. Late last month Quilt released their latest single, for the poignant, gliding “Padova”, and the Christopher Good-directed video took to Italy to capture appropriately organic visuals or fruits and fire and a reconnection to nature.
“This song was written shortly after my mother passed away,” Quilt’s Shane Butler tells NPR. “It was written in Padova, Italy on a night where we were scheduled to perform there in the courtyard of a beautiful villa-like building on the outskirts of the city. There were old ceramic walls, chandeliers, Italian vines and horses on the periphery of the property; it was idyllic to say the least. During this period of time, after my mother had passed, I would talk to her every day. Whether it was in imagination or in spirit doesn’t really matter; my experience was the same. That night in Padova my mother and I talked for a long time as I took a walk around the property. I then happened to come across an old busted up guitar in a giant wooden room with a chandelier in it, I tuned it to something that would work, and this song came out.”
Butler says that in his mother’s passing, “death has taken on infinite voices. There are voices of beauty, melancholy, humor, rejuvenation and freedom located in this experience. When talking with Christopher Good about making this video we talked about making a representation of this experience that involved some of these other aspects of death. Christopher has an incredible eye and mind to make abstract narratives, which is what we decided to go with for this video.”
It’s another stunning, introspective tone from one of our city’s most musically engaging bands. Watch the “Padova” video below, with Sinclair show details after the video jump.
