On her album Meet Me at the Gloaming, A.O. Gerber carefully grapples with the constraints she was taught as a child to reach for the flourishing that comes when we look past the black and white, and into the gray gauze of the in-between. By interlocking memory and imagination, Gerber crafts a gleaming future, where the light and the dark don’t just coexist––they create a new color entirely.
Gerber’s debut LP Another Place To Need (2020) garnered critical acclaim for its candid, orchestral ruminations on splintered relationships and the cage of overthinking. While that record took three years to complete, and saw Gerber collaborate with much of her musical community in Los Angeles and the Bay Area – including Sasami, Madeline Kenney, Marina Allen and Noah Weinman (Runnner) – Gerber stripped back the team for Meet Me at the Gloaming. Once again co-producing with Madeline Kenney, Gerber shunned the usual process of seeking constant feedback, and instead leaned into a more isolated process, later producing much of the record at home.
This somewhat secluded process serves as a mirror to the deeply introspective and thoughtful nature of Meet Me at the Gloaming. Here, Gerber explores her upbringing, much of which took place under the watchful gaze of a spiritual teacher who led her mother to completely uproot their lives, and move the family from Northern California to Southern Oregon when she was ten. The world Gerber was indoctrinated into as a result turned out to be harsh, dogmatic and fixed, with little room for questioning. “Goodness came in actions, thoughts, practices and ideals that weren’t mine and didn’t make sense. It was something to perform,” she says.
But now, reflecting on that upbringing and the adults who were meant to be her caretakers, Gerber is bursting with previously unasked questions, ones she parses out over the course of Meet Me at the Gloaming. What does it mean to be good and who gets to decide? What happens when we seek truth outside ourselves? And how do we reckon with the unforgivable when it comes to those we love?
It’s this open-armed questioning that informs the album's title, the gloaming another term for twilight, that precious hour before day gives way to night. “I was thinking about how damaging it can be to exist in that binary space of good and evil,” Gerber explains. “When we see everything in either/or’s, we lose the nuance and complexity that’s so necessary. I think of the term thin places — a Celtic concept that describes spaces in which we experience the wearing down of the veil between this world and the divine. Places filled with mystery and a certain porosity to magic, that’s neither here nor entirely there. To me, the gloaming turns everything thin.”
Writing from this place of nuance can be daunting, but Gerber tends to these songs with care and grace. “It can be difficult to write about your childhood when you have a lot of shame around it,” she explains. “I wanted to approach it from multiple perspectives, to try to hold the complexity of formative experiences and relationships, and resist the temptation to over-simplify them.”
Meet Me at the Gloaming is certainly an album that pierces grief head-on but it’s not without hope or certainty. On “Looking for the Right Things,” Gerber peels back the desire to attain an externally-imposed idea of goodness while reckoning with the reality of our humanness, and the beauty of our imperfections. And on “Walk in the Dark” she takes solace in her interior world and befriends the uncertainty that comes with healing. “ I still like to walk in the dark, ” she sings.
“ And I don’t mind not knowing what you are. ”
Like curtains strong enough to block the view, but thin enough to let in the light, Gerber is reclaiming the meaning of goodness, where the harsh overwhelming brightness is dimmed to a beautiful, iridescent blue. During the gloaming we are between two spaces, two worlds, two selves and it’s here that we can fully embrace everything that we are.
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