Faustina Masigat's Debut Album Streaming on PopMatters Today

Faustina Masigat's debut album is one of keen reflection and personal struggles that the Portland songwriter has assembled into relatable and beautiful prose, striking a comfortable balance between abstract introspection and objective observations. Her self-titled album, coming out this Friday on Mama Bird Recording Co. (Haley Heynderickx, Courtney Marie Andrews), is streaming in full at PopMatters who say Masigat "develops an intuitive, captivating listen throughout." While speaking to the process of capturing her debut album, Masigat says "there is a mundanity in heartbreak that I struggled to break out of for years. The recording process was deliberately very bare bones because I wanted that tension to be as palpable as possible. If a person really commits to their own suffering, absolutely everything becomes colored by that action. There are songs that carry that weight more than others, but the whole album was inspired by that period of time. I had had writer's block, and it felt like I was moving from situation to situation with no anchor. Every resource I had went into writing and breaking out of that monotony."

Stream / Download Faustina Masigat

Masigat's last single, "Colored Glass", uses the levity of its pop sound to tackle Masigat's own struggles with anxiety but, ultimately, how she copes, how she heals and how to find a place beyond the overwhelming feeling of being trapped inside of yourself. Uproxx premiered the track saying that the "songs Faustina Masigat writes aren't of the flashy, formulaic kind. Instead, she traverses through life with an acute attentiveness, gathering simple, sweetly sincere fragments of her experiences along the way and turning them into captivating folk-pop numbers."

The second single from Faustina Masigat's Mama Bird Recording Co. debut premiered on American Songwriter who called it a "simply rendered love song [that] showcases Masigat's delicate vocals, contemplative songwriting, and affection for the intimacy brought forth from a worn-out guitar or an imperfect take." Speaking to her process Masigat said ""Stay with Me" was my attempt at writing a love song, in the very traditional sense. It was originally recorded as a duet, but over time it made less and less sense conceptually to have any vocals other than my own on the album. Ben Nugent, who mixed the record, encouraged me to keep the songs self contained in this way; to dig into that intimacy instead of obscuring it."

"One Day", the album's first single, matches Masigat's voice to the interplay of her guitar style and the depth of Dan Bindschedler's cello.

Frustrated by academia and emotionally raw from a breakup, Faustina Masigat stepped away from her peers in her mid-twenties. She had come to realize that her personal and artistic maturation had been stifled by her relationships and her overly angular traditional musical schooling. She knew she needed to spend more time alone, committed to a process of unlearning, before she could move forward. As she peeled back the rigid layers of her youth, she began to write the songs that, a few years later, would make up her debut record. Seeking honesty over perfection, her approach to composition became much more intuitive; seated in the natural expression of not only her emotional life, but also that of a spiritual life, an expression of her own femininity, and a means of self improvement through self reflection. She became obsessed with the old, forgotten, second-hand guitars she would find in the "As Is" section of local music shops, believing that magic and songs still lived in the beat-up wood. One album track, "Willie Nelson", manifested, fully formed, from one of these guitars - an ancient, labeless individual that she called 'Red'.

The songwriting on her self-titled debut is all at once heartbreaking, intelligent, meditative and elegant - centered around a voice that is difficult to attach genre to. There is a quiet intensity running through the world that Faustina creates: sweet and heavy, a touch of angst, brutally honest, smoldering. The album is understated, arranged as to allow Faustina's effortless rapport with pedal steel player Tucker Jackson (The Minus 5, The Delines) to shine clearest. It's a spacious and lush debut, with all of her vulnerabilities laid bare in songs hemmed together with fragile intimacy.

Faustina Masigat will be released on April 6th, 2018 via Mama Bird Recording Co. It was recorded by Rian Lewis, mixed by Ben Nugent and mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk, all in Portland, Oregon.

Photo Credit: Vincent Bancheri

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