Abby Posner Rest and Rise
Abby Posner made nearly every sound on Rest and Rise herself. She produced it, engineered it, mixed it, and played almost every instrument on it, including a cello banjo that turns up like a character in a novel. On a record about rebuilding a life that came apart, that is not just a credit. It is the method. Nobody was coming to do the rebuilding for her, in the songs or in the studio.
The album arrives in two halves, “Rest” and “Rise,” twelve songswritten over two to three years in the wake of a heavy breakup. The first half sits in the wreckage. Grief, exhaustion, the strange quiet of a house that used to hold two people. The second half starts, slowly and without any false cheer, to stand up. Posner has said she wanted to honor the messiness of healing while still believing something beautiful waits on the other side, and the sequencing does exactly that. Nothing on the “Rise” side pretends the “Rest” side did not happen.
It opens with “I’m Doing Fine,” Freddy Angelico’s pedal steel warming the edges, and the title is the first thing on the record you should not take at face value. The song watches the outside world keep right on turning after a breakup, for everyone except the singer. It is the least convincing and most honest sentence a person in recovery learns to say, and Posner builds the whole album behind it.
Late on the “Rise” side, “Failures on the Wall” brings in Ryan Cassata, the record’s one guest voice, to take on the scorekeepers who keep a running tally of our worst moments. “Die Alone” follows, released as a single ahead of the album, and it is the record in miniature. The title sounds like a surrender. The song plays like an anthem, one she sings out loud to herself, the way you talk your own feet back into moving when stopping to rest would be easier. Then the last word belongs to “33,” where she turns the questions on herself, asking why she keeps choosing the wrong girls and hurting the right ones. The record does not end with a sunrise. It ends with a woman standing far enough from the wreckage to turn around and look at it, and honest enough to count her own part in it, which is its own kind of rising.
Posner calls herself genre fluid, and for once the label earns its keep. These songs start where her songs have always started, on banjo and guitar, in the folk and Americana rooms where she has played Mountain Stage, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and AmericanaFest. But they do not stay there. Indie rock textures and adventurous production push at the edges, and because one person made nearly all of it, the experiments never sound pasted on. They sound like one mind following a song wherever it asked to go.
Plenty of breakup records confuse honesty with volume. Rest and Rise is quieter and braver than that. Posner is unusually personal in her songwriting, sharing more than most writers would, trusting the listener with the unedited version of herself. It lets healing be nonlinear. Not every song resolves. Some are allowed to just rest. And it trusts the listener to sit in the same uncertainty she sat in making it. When the rising finally comes, it has been earned at the full price the first half charged. For anyone learning to begin again, Posner has built a companion, largely alone, that will make you feel less so.
Rest and Rise is available now on Golden Poppy Music.
Find more information here on her website: https://www.abbyposner.com
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: REVIEW: Abby Posner “Kisbee Ring”
Credits: Abby Posner, producer, engineer, mixing, and nearly all instruments and vocals. Ryan Cassata, vocals and co-writing on “Failures on the Wall.” Freddy Angelico, pedal steel on “I’m Doing Fine.” Dave Locke, mastering.