Throughout time and across cultures, salt has been used as a shield, strewn about to purify an area, poured out to safeguard from harm. With her latest album, Salt Around My Bed, Mynolia is sprinkling her music like salt around the peace she has found over the last few years.

 

Born from a season of shifting and reshaping, the spectral folk singer-songwriter’s sophomore effort – and first release in partnership with Full Time Hobby – is an invitation into a deeply transformative space, one that finds her navigating a lifetime of change, making sense of the turmoil currently marring the present day, but also giving a voice to all she has learned along the way.

 

After more than a decade living in Berlin, Germany, having settled into her adult life following formative years spent in constant motion, Mynolia made the decision to embark on another new beginning. She landed in the remote wilderness of the American South, a place where she was able to draw those curative breaths and bring forth her most transformative work to date.

 

“The choice to relocate and start a new life again was huge,” the artist explains. “It was on my own terms for the first time.”

 

That regenerative experience becomes a tangible thing throughout Salt Around My Bed. As Mynolia spent her days learning the land and leaning into the necessary solitude of her new home, she tapped into the unhurried rhythm humming around her. She wrote songs, captured field recordings, and gave worn-in instruments new life. She taught herself various production techniques as she went, spending hours in an overheating home studio molding difficult lessons and fresh wisdoms into hypnotic synths and lush vocals.

 

“My mind is a seesaw in pursuit of balance,” Mynolia shares, “but most of the time it’s the not thinking that makes things snap into focus, the laughing that deepens the capacity for emotion and temperance that actually lays the foundation for change, both personal and collective.”

 

With emotions given the space to lead, Salt Around My Bed is forged in contrasting attitudes and shaded by duality: where there is surrender also lies sturdy boundaries; sincerity is tinged in playfulness; dreams bleed into reality; and the cynical is met with the sacred.

 

Songs like the pillowy “Holy Line” and delicate “Surrender & Ash” strikingly capture this chapter and the beautiful paradox of relinquishing restraints in order to find a wholeness. Where the album’s more exacting tracks, such as the enveloping “Pennies are Gold” and the ambling “Take the Mountain By Surprise,” ring with a honed candor, they are also peppered with a much-needed sarcasm and sharpened banter throughout. In the same breath, the sardonic weaves with the divine, a bone-deep spirituality sighing through offerings like the eviscerating “Run Like Hell” and the entrancing “Needle.”

 

“It is the teetering between extremes that I love,” Mynolia describes, “drawing circles that can encompass at least parts of everyone, blending songbirds with analog noise pedals, soft classical guitar with distorted horns and floating harmonies with searing synths.”

 

Along the way, she turned to deep reflection, reminiscing as a means of learning, as a voyage toward answers.

 

She reflected on the idea of “home,” something that, for much of her life, has had a fluid meaning. Having lived in a new country every few years of her adolescence, she has come to rely heavily on words her mother once told her: “You are a boat and can choose to throw your anchor to the ocean floor, or throw it into your own hull and feel at home anywhere you drift.” Such a sentiment whispers throughout this project, the artist’s arresting vulnerability consistently met with an unwavering resilience that only comes from a lifetime of experience.

 

She also found herself tuning into the mundane magic unfurling all around, making friends with her superstitions and recognizing the holiness in even the humblest of tasks. The burning of pictures, the scattering of salt, the crushing of eggshells for the garden – Mynolia conducts each ritual with equal care throughout the album, understanding the power we all hold within.

 

The slow season of solo writing and self-production that gave life to Salt Around My Bed proved a major milestone for its creator.

 

“I wanted to really challenge that part of myself,” she says of making the album, and it was from such a challenge that made opening up her circle all the more gratifying. “It was from my solitude in the initial recordings that I managed to connect outwards to a widespread array of unnervingly talented friends, and once co-producer Rich Ruth stepped into the ring, the shared vision really began to shine and levitate even higher.”

 

She brought the almost finished project to the celebrated ambient jazz instrumentalist, and with the help of musicians and friends from around the world, they fleshed out the final vision. Pete Pételle and Florian Holoubek added drums and percussion. Full Time Hobby label-mate Spencer Cullum provided pedal steel, with Corin Droullard on horns. Violin and mandolin were courtesy of Patrick McGonigle, with Sam Que on flute. Mynolia’s friend Taylor Wafford provided backing vocals, and her husband Charles Michael Parks Jr. (of the band All Them Witches) played bass.

 

Together they strike a brilliant balance, crafting a sound that is wholly Mynolia as she is now: earthen and serene, gritty but grinning, cosmic and alive, a mystic folk cast in a Berliner haze and warped by a Southern heat. In this way, Salt Around My Bed is a staggering snapshot of artistic and personal evolution.

 

“I feel that this record has accompanied me through a large shift in my life, not just from where I live, but with saying things and moving forward boldly without inhibitions,” she describes, sharing how this heart-baring endeavor resulted in a feeling of freedom.

 

Mynolia is committed to defending this latest chapter, scattering a protective circle around all she has gathered, leaned into, and let go of in recent years, but on Salt Around My Bed, there’s space for you to join and welcome peace alongside her.

 

As she says, “I’ll keep chugging as we all have to, and hope that these salty lines and open chest songs resonate with others.”