Sandy Bell

Alternative musician, singer-songwriter Sandy Bell plumbs the damaged American psyche with the poetical precision of Emily Dickinson and the cinematic psychological acuity of David Lynch. In essence, she transmutes the bone-core despair and grief of broken American dreams and fears into a sonic cathedral of songs – a cathartic transfiguration of pain to reckoning.

Bell’s solo debut album, When I Leave Ohio (2017), is an intensely personal excavation of broken dreams, of the difficulties of love, of the oft quiet rage that can consume oneself and those we love. It explores, “All the ways I leave … and all the ways they left.”  Joan Wasser’s (aka Joan As Policewoman) haunting violin snakes through the Americana poetry of birds, blue eyeshadow, cash registers, and purses filled with cold stones, and the spiritually infused lush, enunciated musical production, while Bell’s voice floats over all like a ghostly prayer.

Stereo Embers Magazine writes of Bell’s debut: “When I Leave Ohio (2017) is one of the darkest, most moving song cycles this critic has heard since Patty Griffin’s Living With Ghosts or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska ... Sandy Bell’s songs have such poetic precision and crushing emotional exactitude, her work is nothing short of staggering.”

Bell’s follow-up album Entelechy (2023) reaches for the stars through the crack in Pandora’s box. Inspired by the natural and invisible forces of our mysterious world, the songs emotionally and musically mirror the subtle intricacies of cellular biology, the heartbeat of tall dark pines and moss, and the gravitational pull binding us to endlessly revolve around that luminous star sun that we awake to every day. Music journalist Alex Green raved that Entelechy is “filled with stirring melancholy and musical grace,” an album that “explores the geometry of both musical form and sorrow, while the cathartic transmutation of grief into promise will take you somewhere between the worlds of Harry Nilsson and Kate Bush.”

Born the youngest of five in Cleveland, OH, her father was an ice deliveryman and community college teacher and her mother worked at hotels, grocery stores and the local horse track. Even though there was “a beautiful attempt at the American dream,” her family life was darkened by the realities of the myth and Bell developed a “distrust of anything too happy” and a realization that she was in “the underbelly of the animal.” Music was her respite. Raised in the church, she remembers the thrill of listening to her family lined one after another raising their voices: her mother, a voice like the English  sweetheart singer Vera Lynn, and her father with his gift for harmonies and a voice that sounded like he was an “astronaut singing from outer space.” It was here in the church listening to the organist or choir and looking up at the stained glass and sculptures that music and art became neurally fused in her head. Later, inspired by the original abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Elain de Kooning, she realized when an artwork is emotionally honest, she hears its music.

Her most notable collaborations have included background vocals on Bat For Lashes' Mercury Prize-nominated album The Bride (2016). She also co-wrote and recorded with her good friend the brilliant and soulful Jeff Buckley during their '80s Hollywood days. The song Hollywould, co-written with Buckley and featuring him on acoustic guitar, was included on her EP, My Muse My Monkey (GSI Records 2000).

After Bell opened a number of dates on Rachel Yamagata’s Galactic Trees Tour (2022-24), Yamagata said, “There is something otherworldly about Sandy and her offerings that encourage us to unapologetically reach for words like ‘channeling’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘healing’ and essence.’ Her role as an artist is bigger than most may understand at first, but if you dive into the ocean that she offers, you will find magic very few have privy to thus far.”

[Claudia Summers]