Photo by Ginger Fierstein
Today Sis and the Lower Wisdom shares the third single from the forthcoming album, Saints and Aliens, out Jan. 9. It’s the fourth album overall for Jenny Gillespie Mason, who previously recorded as just “Sis.”
“This song was written from start to finish very quickly, one of those experiences that you can’t remember how exactly you wrote something, it just appears really seamlessly like a waterfall coming down. I wanted to write from the emotional place of parenting my son through a delicate and difficult time dealing with his anxiety, wanting to teach him spiritual truths that had helped me along the way, but also feeling worried and heartsick that he was going through something like this. His middle name is Wolf, and during this time it was almost like he became a Wolf Child, feral and a bit crazed, but it was like I totally got why he was expressing himself that way at this certain time on Earth.” -Jenny Gillespie Mason
Saints and Aliens by Sis and the Lower Wisdom celebrates the bliss and strangeness of lived life on a planet hanging out in space. What started as a series of solo homespun sonic experiments bloomed more fully in collaboration with a larger group of LA-based musicians, prompting the birth of the collective name the Lower Wisdom.
Taken from the Gnostic concept of divine wisdom falling from a higher sphere to the lower realms in order to experience itself in materiality, the name expresses how music can be a vessel for spirit to stumble, shimmer, and find form.
Culled from two years of singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Gillespie Mason’s writing and recording processes, then sharpening in collaboration with the producer and bassist Dougie Stu, the album begins with more direct, intimate songs such as “Crocus Man” and “Wolf Child,” speaking to the pure magic of the saints and aliens among our beloveds. Midway through, the album drifts outward into widescreen meditations (“Yoga of the Soul’s Release,” “Luce”) on the soul’s emergence from behind the veil of the outer self. The sound exists in a messy, luminous space between improvisational jazz and Mason’s longtime love of catchy pop. Saints and Aliens is out 1/9/26 on Native Cat Recordings.
