SILVERWARE

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With her sophomore album One True Light, San Francisco-based artist, producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Ainsley Wagoner takes her long-evolving project Silverware into a new space, one with many rooms but no predictable blueprint. While the music is still ostensibly built around Wagoner’s dynamic vocals and structurally adventurous composition style, there are new levels of both intention and searching here, with careful time spent exploring angles of production, performance, and arrangement in the process of finding the emotional core of each song. The result is not just a collection of multidimensional songcraft that shifts effortlessly between textural early morning reflections and sparkling art pop, but a document of vibrant, exponential growth.

Wagoner came up in Lexington, Kentucky’s weird and interwoven d.i.y. circles, playing gigs as Silverware as early as 2010. The project started truly finding its shape with a 2014 move to the Bay Area. In the course of getting established in her new zone, Wagoner immersed herself in booking and promoting shows, developing her practice of production and studio playing, working as both a band leader and a supportive player, investing in coalition-building, and generally using Silverware as a vessel to connect with her new community. Resiliently self-sufficient, Wagoner independently created and released multiple EPs and a limited-run 7”, all leading up to 2021 full length No Plans. Quickly tracked to tape at the original (now-shuddered) SF location of legendary studio Tiny Telephone, in close collaboration with engineer/producer Omar Akrouche, No Plans was a jubilant, if brief burst of early expression. Assessing what she would have done differently when approaching her next album, Wagoner dialed back the urgency, giving painstaking attention to every step of the album-making process. Musical ideas that just barely began surfacing in earlier work were unpacked and reframed, complex lyrical perspectives were fleshed out even further, and time quickly stopped being a concern at all. Wagoner once again teamed with Akrouche, but his move from the Bay to Los Angeles meant their work became more piecemeal. Recording happened at various studios in multiple cities, both in person and remotely over the course of more than two years. This unhurried pace and deeper consideration on every level divined an album that leveled up the quality and articulation of Wagoner’s songs, and slowly revealed her active presence as not just a skilled vocalist and songwriter, but a studio auteur.

The clear-headed, piano-led  “No Expectations” offsets its hopes-raised-and-dashed narrative with a light, cherry instrumentation that collages ‘80s pop with the faintest hints of adult-contemporary radio hits of the Winwood and Hornsby variety, only to jostle the delicate balance with unexpected moments of choppy technical riffing and left-field group vocal shouting. “New Bright Room” tunes into controlled ambience, its layers of vocals floating weightlessly in an atmosphere that somehow simultaneously holds tension and acceptance. As the album plays on, Wagoner seamlessly blurs art pop magnanimity with hook-based bangers that can be traditional or abstract. One moment she’s walking by the house someone she used to know lived in, wistful and a little sad in the familiar confines of straightforward indie rock melancholy, the next she’s strumming a bright acoustic guitar in full Americana regalia, then seconds later tweaking the filters on a vintage synth to add bite to a song that’s as experimental as it is confessional. 

Each of the ten songs that make up One True Light take their own distinctive path. Wagoner’s visionist production is the connective tissue that makes her experiments with cellophane-wrapped synth pop work alongside subtly jazz-tinged arrangements or make sense interspersed with Friday night shout-along anthems. The stylistic streams change often and drastically, but Wagoner remains at home and locked in airtight focus on whatever sound she approaches. Never heavy-handed or pushy, One True Light moves through its multi-hued chapters with grace and even slight deflection, careful not to announce any of its changes too blatantly. Ultimately, this soft touch makes the songs all the more powerful, as Wagoner gently but masterfully weaves all of her complex feelings, quiet revelations, critically inspected channels of thought, and bounds of playful musical exploration into an album knowingly unlike anything else in its milieu. Just how fearlessly different One True Light is becomes vividly apparent the more time that’s spent with it.

-Fred Thomas