PREMIERE | Quiet Takes, "Meri Said" (Spruce Street Version)

Sarah Michelle Magill of Quiet Takes; photographed by Graham Tolbert.

Adapting a personal work to a more minimalist form provides new revelations to the artist, and their audience. Stripping away any embellishments and elaborate appendages when done delicately can deliver new accents and enhanced perspectives to the voice and views of the artistic entity in question. Eschewing the pratfalls of reductive or diminished alterations, re-envisioning a work gives it a new life. From remixing a track stem by stem, to re-conceptualizing a piece through more rudimentary instruments and creative tools; one of the many tenets of art is how it asks the artist for interpretations and re-interpretations. New renditions exhibited and expressed through more intimate means can connect to a central core of our collective humanity that elicits new responses, new meanings, deeper realizations, and a resonance that rings and rattles with emanations of the sacred and sublime.

This can be experienced in the minimalist keyboard and vocal performance of “Meri Said” (Spruce Street version) from Quiet Takes. Originally featured off the album Regrets Only released earlier this year, Eau Claire, WI artist Sarah Michelle Magill trades in the lavish electro arrangement for an elegant expression of anecdotal chamber trad trajectories of the candid variety. From its restrained techno beginnings to concert hall confessional; Sarah sends out a sincere song of endearingly demure pop that graces the world like a vesper signaling the twilight’s invitation of the ensuing eve.

"Meri Said" (Spruce Street Version) illustrates the subtle and intimate core of the Quiet Takes sound & sensibility. The session sees Sarah in a forestall sanctuary along a quiet path, equipped with only a synthesizer where the pensive song takes on a new life. The visuals from Erik and Sarah Elstran begin with one continuous slow zoom out that reveals more and more of the spruce trees that surround the artist, eventually casting their lens at the natural canopy above before returning to Sarah's performance on a makeshift stage in the middle of the woods. The Spruce Street Version sweeps the listener away to the stories that chronicle the thoughts, desires, and dreams of offscreen characters that are sung in meditations that search for the meaning at the core it all. "Meri Said" searches deep down for those metaphors that provide universal revelations for all that have dared to dream, for all that have dared to love, and all that have dared to live a life abundant in spirit.

Sarah Magill provided insights on the making of the Spruce Street version of “Meri Said”:

I loved doing a keys-and-me-only version of "Meri Said" during a Milwaukee Studio Session so much that I wanted to release a similar solo version.

Tranquil meditations in nature with Sarah of Quiet Takes; self-portrait.

I went back into the studio, aka the living room of producer Zach Hanson (Bon Iver, S. Carey, Gordi), to capture a live take on this track. The video transports that living room setting to a serene forest trail, thanks to the help of video creators Erik and Sarah Elstran.

Quiet Takes’ “Meri Said” (Spruce Street version) can be pre-saved here.