Written by Ivona Homicianu
After the success of her debut album can we start over?, Charlotte Sands returns with her sophomore album ‘Satellite’. Running at ten tracks, the record is Sands’ search for meaning, identity and self-worth. The title track ‘Satellite,’ expresses the desire to be there for someone. Through a futuristic sound and distorted echoed vocals, Sands opens the album at full speed. “I’m scared of heights, but I won’t come down,” sums up the album itself. The artist bares her soul in the search of connection – whether that is to her audience or her relationships – and she shows that doing things scared is better than not doing them at all.
When asked about the album’s title, Sands admitted it was difficult for her to choose one. To her, all the songs were cohesive but expressed different emotions in different sonic ways, therefore she encountered trouble finding one word or phrase to define all of it. What convinced her was her constant return to ‘Satellite’. “It is exactly how I felt writing all these songs. It’s all about one thing that’s revolving around another, whether that’s me and the people who come to my shows and the audience and we’re always existing together as one, no matter where we are in the world and no matter how far apart we are from each other. We’re orbiting this world, in this community, and these similar feelings and experiences that we all share. I loved the idea of being like, ‘Even when you can’t see me, even as a friend, even when I’m not around, I’m always orbiting you, and I’m always aware of you, and I’m always present in your existence.’”
With ‘Satellite’ being her sophomore album, she reflects on the growth between her debut album can we start over? and the new project: “I genuinely think I will go to my grave being so immensely proud of [can we start over?] and every song on it, and that is already more than I feel like any artist can ever ask for.” She adds, “I wanted so badly to feel the same way about the next project, and I think ‘Satellite’ is almost the release of that pressure on myself and letting myself experiment with new sounds and new influences and different types of music, and not trying not to take myself too seriously.”
Her confidence stands out in the album, with debut single ‘HUSH,’ an anthemic drum-heavy track expressing frustration towards someone’s constant judgment. Later in the album, ‘None of My Business’, takes us on a punk-rock rollercoaster as she questions if someone’s hate for her isn’t in reality an obsession. It’s a fun track that puts into words a universal experience.
Sands noted she wouldn’t have dared to put out these songs two years ago, due to her desire to be taken seriously. Nowadays, she’s focusing on people enjoying her art: “I want them to have fun and experience these songs and feel seen and feel confident, but also feel validated in the negative and the positive emotions that they experience throughout their lives.”
When first listening to the album, ‘half alive’ caught my attention. Her higher register and distanced sound initiate the track with vulnerability, before the drums and Sands’ urgency take us back to the emotionally charged atmosphere that she excels at. This duality is what makes ‘half alive’ such a satisfying track.
With lyrics such as “It must be nice to have a brain that doesn’t ruin everything,” she expresses an emotional struggle that brought forth curiosity. I asked her about the sentiment that sparked this track. “We were in the room, and I was working with Jesse Thomas who’s an incredible songwriter. We were talking about how in my life I’m a super optimistic person, but because of my career having to be so DIY, having to be so realistic in all these ways and all these moments where I should be able to not think about the business side, my brain has gotten very fogged up by the new age of music and social media and all these things… Any happy thing would cause an immediate negative reaction to it, and so I felt like I was never quite winning at anything… I think a lot of people experience that.”
“Every single day I am trying to manage how to exist as a creative person who is very much meant to be alive. Allowing my brain to be inspired by things and create things, and then do that every single day. Instead, 90% of my time I’m on my computer, I’m responding to emails, I’m coming up with digital marketing strategies. I’m producing, directing, editing, video shoots, and all these things that I am so grateful that I get. Everything I’m even mentioning, I’m like, ‘What an awesome job.’ I’m so grateful for it, but it’s really difficult to switch. It’s literally two different parts of your brain.”
She explains it as being one foot in one headspace and one foot in another, doing everything with only a part of yourself so you’re not taking too much of a risk. “Realizing that anytime I’d be so happy in a relationship, my brain would be like, ‘The happier you are now, the worse it’s gonna hurt when it is [over].’” She reveals that songwriting allows her to process these complex emotions: “The second I write the song and record it and it’s out of my body, it’s almost like those emotions have a different place to live, where I don’t have to carry them around the world every day. They can live in their own universe that I’ve created for them and the house I’ve built for them, but they no longer get to live in mine, and that’s a really helpful process for me.”
Throughout the record, there’s a lot of metaphors surrounding death. Along with ‘half alive,’ the death of a relationship is explored in ‘one eye open,’ ‘Afterlife’ and ‘back to you.’ Even though it’s metaphorical, the grief is palpable and real.
“I’ve spent so much time trying to make projects that felt cohesive and felt like they all lived in one world. Every time I’ve done that, I felt like I was cheating on a version of myself because I was like, ‘This isn’t completely honest,’” she says. “For women, we’re so often meant to be one thing, and we get boxed in as one emotion or one feeling. I’ve always wanted to be multi-layered. I want to be an onion and continue to peel back versions of myself and experiences.”
“How do I try and write a song for almost every feeling you can have as a human being, so that every single person can find a song that they relate to on this project? That was really important to me. I feel like I owe that to the people who listen to my music, trying to give them something that they can dance to and laugh with their friends and jump around and escape the sometimes very dark reality of our world, and then other times be able to sit in their sadness and sit with their grief and come to terms with other experiences that they’ve had that might feel really heavy, but at least know that they’re doing it like alongside me, and they kind of have a friend like walking through it with them.”
‘Satellite’ makes sense as a cohesive piece of work. However, it spans many different emotions. You can revisit the album and find songs you didn’t previously relate to, or a song might take you back to a previous experience. It’s this breadth that means the album provides universal relatability. Sands says “Sometimes that’s so important to also give those emotions and those experiences a voice and give them a place. I feel like we hold things in our bodies until we understand them, until we can give them a name, and that’s all they want sometimes, is just to be categorized… Sometimes you need to hear somebody else talk about it to understand it better in your own head.”
When questioned about what song she was doubtful about putting on the record, she smiled as she thought of her answer. “This is so funny. This is such a typical me thing. ‘None of My Business,’ which is the focus track on the album, was a song that I was never planning on releasing.” It feels cheesy and sassy to her and, since the other songs are more mature, it felt out of place. The more she listened to it, the more she could picture singing it live: “It reminds me of some of the first music I made and what people would want to scream and yell and have the best time singing together.”
‘water me down’ is about those people who get into a couple and want to change everything about the other person. Speaking of the phenomenon, Sands says, “I’ve thought about this so much because this is an experience that I’ve had a lot of times where I would get into a relationship with somebody [and] all of their favorite things about me would be the loudest things about my personality, like being social and being confident and being really motivated in my career. These things that initially they would be so attracted to and be like, ‘I want that in a partner,’ almost every single time those would become the things that they would start to resent about me.”
“A lot of the time people see something – and I’m not comparing myself to a flower – but they see something that they find interesting or attractive, and then they just naturally want it for themselves. I want to take these flowers and put them in my kitchen, knowing that they’re going to die, knowing that they can’t live their life there. The idea of this song very much came from that happening with me, but also watching that happen with friends, of being the brightest, funniest, loudest, outgoing people, and then they would meet a partner that would, over time, kind of like chip away at the things that were the most incredible about them. Over time, you see the color leaving their personality and their body. I’ve seen that happen to so many women in my life, and people trying to slowly make you smaller and smaller, because it makes them feel more comfortable and makes them feel bigger.”
At the moment, Sands’ main challenge is trying to get back into the mindset of creating things and not seeing them from a marketing perspective. She mentions her goal this year is to find a way to disappear for a second and write the best music she could. She reveals, “In the long run, that will be more important than posting online for weeks, and that will be more important to my growth as an artist and my growth as a human.”
But right now, she’s focused on finishing up the album rollout. “I’m very excited for what comes after that… I feel like I haven’t written anything in so long because we’ve been preparing for this project.”
Since I already asked her this question for the release of ‘Afterlife,’ I switched up the mandatory question and asked her which color this album specifically would be. She reiterated her previous answer, which was olive green. “It’s the color of the vinyl that we have. I chose that color before I even knew what the album artwork would look like. I didn’t feel an automatic pull or gut instinct about the artwork. I just decided one night to just go through all of these vinyl options that they had sent me. I was like, ‘Maybe this will inspire me to start almost completely backwards.’ And as I went through, I found the olive. That is the core of all the visuals. That snowballed into the artwork and the vinyls and certain colors that I’ve kind of kept throughout the release.” For the Karma! Magazine Playlist, she recommended ‘Attaway’ by Phantogram: “That’s one I always go back to. I’m obsessed with Phantogram.”
The album ends on a hopeful note with ‘Sunday,’ a guitar-string focused track that sees Sands’ soft vocals take the front stage as she gives herself permission to fall in love. It is a distinct sentiment on the record, as she comes to the conclusion that the love she has for herself allows for it to spread onto other relationships. So what does she hope listeners will take away from the record? “I hope that they are just able to recognize how broad the human experience is and how normal and powerful it is to experience so many things. Writing it, I really wanted to show that you can be in a dark place that feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, and you can still end with a song like ‘Sunday,’ and still feel absolute bliss and joy and love… The base line of it is that we are all allowed to be very different, experience very different things, but at the same time, we are all doing it together and alongside each other, even when we can’t see each other. There’s always that pull bringing us back to our center and bringing us back to each other.”
Sands’ calm passion shines through when she speaks about this project. Her answers are thoughtful and elaborate, which shows she is someone that thinks everything through, not just in her art but also in terms of the broader human condition. ‘Satellite’ is another chapter in her story which is revealing Sands in her truest and brightest self.
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