To write the songs on their second album Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter, who record together under the name West of Roan (members of Doran), spent time in collective imagination, journeying to their respective inner worlds and under worlds. As they simultaneously discovered and created a psychic landscape of story, song, archetype, and image, a figure emerged: the Queen of Eyes. Lending her name to the collection of myths they composed, the Queen of Eyes is a god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy. She served as their guide as the duo navigated personal and cultural grief and shame to summon sparse yet richly evocative songs that serve as beacons of human truth and vulnerability through wounds and experiences of perfectionism, dominance, colonization, and capitalism. The original songs on Queen of Eyes—which are rooted in ancient archetypes and draw from the wellspring of traditional music and all of its humanity, emotion, and history—are a deeply resonant balm for a fractured culture, a bridge across the void, a solace for listener and singer alike.

Schermer and Showalter recorded Queen of Eyes themselves, in a small one-room, off-grid cabin on Waldron Island off the coast of Washington State. They ran their ear trumpet condenser microphone off an extension cord connected to the main source of solar power. This recording session—with one microphone, one computer, one cord, and one bench the two sat on—captures the emotional intimacy of their music, along with occasional pops from the fire that heated the cabin, instrument creaks, and breathing sounds. This feels especially fitting for West of Roan’s approach; when you hear them sing you get the sense that they are first singing for and to each other, and emboldened by each other’s presence, together they make their offering to you, the listener.

Queen of Eyes opens with “The Bell,” a song that emerged from the duo’s conversations about gods of loss and ancestral wounds, texts about the Sumerian underworld demon-goddess Ereshkigal, and while living through a pandemic and forest fires that filled the air of their homeland with smoke. With its fiddle and harmonium drone and close harmony, the song is an invocation calling for healing, searching, and nourishment. The duo intones with a clarity of vision: “Sister find me/Sister keep me fed,” as if asking it of each other. Relationships on Queen of Eyes are familial—brothers, daughters, mothers and fathers, echoing the close-knit friendship of the duo, their songwriting practice, and overarching ethos.

Channing wrote the title track “Queen of Eyes” in a time called darkness or mental illness, realizing that she needed to fully enter the underworld and give herself  over to the forces that reign there, instead of hiding from them. She says, “I imagine a sick bed, where one is walking around their beloved and singing. There are roses in the room.” The song was inspired by Georgian “Batonebo” songs which call the “angels of sickness” out from the body, releasing a child from illness. In this case, the angel is the Queen of Eyes. “In the dark forest where she waits/The queen she wears a long gown of eyes/She eats my body every time it’s the only way I come back alive/On her waist she wears a silver key and my ribs meet to make a door.”

While tracks like “The White Crow” have the symbolic transcendence of a much older ballads, “Let No One Steal Your Thyme,” also known as “The Sprig of Thyme,” or “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” is the lone traditional song on the album. West of Roan’s arrangement, with its harmonies and softly finger-picked guitar, is inspired by the singing of British folk singer Anne Briggs, and listeners will also hear traces of influence from Silly Sisters’ June Tabor and Maddy Prior, 60s duo Kathy and Carol, contemporary Irish folk band Lankum, and writers Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Ursula Le Guin across the record.

Queen of Eyes culminates with “By All The Light,” which Annie wrote for Channing on her birthday, just a few days before the COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States. The song, which feels like both a promise made to each other and a lesson imparted, became something of an anthem for the duo through those difficult years, and continues to provide solace for living in beauty and difficulty at the same time: “Sing, sing  a song of living through the dying of the day.” It’s a fitting and hopeful end for this warm and vulnerable album, manifesting a new reality for themselves, each other, and the world.

Queen of Eyes Tracklist:

1. The Bell

2. Bread of Life

3. The Mountain

4. The White Crow

5. Queen of Eyes

6. Let No One Steal Your Thyme

7. Gentian

8. Bright

9. October Dance

10. All the Water

11. Tones

12. The Beran

13. By All the Light

Queen of Eyes was mixed by West of Roan and Joseph “joebass” Dejarnette at Studio 808A. Mastering by Joseph “joebass” DeJarnatte at Studio 808A. Recorded by West of Roan on a single mic in an off-grid cabin on Waldron Island, Washington. Cover art and design by Sarah Bachman.

West of Roan’s Queen of Eyes will be available on CD, cassette, and digitally on July 12, 2024.