Zoh Amba - Eyes Full
In music, Zoh Amba is always striving for greater proximity to the divine. On Eyes Full, their debut singer-songwriter release and first with Matador, they’ve never come closer. Having already become one of the most exciting saxophonists to emerge from NYC’s avant-garde scene, Amba is now letting their heart guide them back to their first instrument, the guitar, and to their hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee. The music is distinctly, instinctively tied to that place: muddy, loose blues with sweet burnishes of Appalachian folk. It feels like a pure transmission of their soul.
Every song on Eyes Full circles the idea of seeing and being seen. The record looks closely at the lives of working-class folk in small towns who bust their asses off while trying to find any salvation they can. “I hope these songs touch people’s hearts,” Amba says. “They’re about people who really need to be seen and heard.”
For years, Amba tried to find an identity outside of where they came from. Raised in the mountain towns of Tennessee, they left at seventeen for San Francisco, then moved to New York City soon after. Yet no matter how far they traveled, home always wrapped itself around their ankle. “When you try to run from something it ends up catching up to you,” they say now, speaking in a thick Southern drawl they no longer attempt to hide. “And you have to deal with it.”
Though Amba had long believed that pure instrumental music could help souls, and that transcendence could be reached without language, words eventually pushed their way in. While playing saxophone, they often felt as though they were being carried heavenward: their body burning, tears rising, the music opening a direct line to God. But alongside that ecstasy came flashes of darker childhood memories. The guitar became a way to face those visions directly, to hold them at eye level rather than flee. They sang their way through it, and back to Kingsport.
Growing up, Amba watched their small town pass through a difficult, destabilizing period. For a time, they tried to keep that reality at arm’s length, only later recognizing how thin the line was between themselves and those who suffered most. They grew a greater sense of grace and understanding for these people. Each song on Eyes Full, which is entirely character-driven — from the kid benumbed by medication (‘OCD’) to the weed-eating man who plays hide-and-seek with God (‘Weed Eating’) — is an act of love for them. “They all deserve to go to heaven,” says Amba, rejecting the punitive theology that surrounded them in the Bible Belt. Songs about damnation never made sense to them; what interested them instead was mercy, and the possibility of redemption. (continue reading full album on our DISCO)
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