Tomberlin – From A Flower To A Garden

Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor’s kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut while living at home. For a while after leaving home and church, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked a day job and kept writing songs. She posted some of these songs to Bandcamp, which led to her signing a record deal with Saddle Creek, and her debut album, At Weddings. It all happened fast: Less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and she ended up moving to L.A. which is where she wrote Projections (2020), her EP followup to At Weddings, though she recorded it in Philadelphia.

During the pandemic, Sarah Beth was all over the place, physically and mentally. Louisville. Los Angeles. Back home in Illinois for a bit. Brooklyn, where she’s now settled, she says. Brooklyn is also where the album was recorded, at Figure 8 studios over the course of two weeks, with producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe (who played a variety of instruments on the collection), and later mastered by Josh Bonati, also in Brooklyn. 

Her process of creating songs can feel like a conversation she’s having with herself: Often, she says, she will open a notebook to jot down a line or phrase only to find a whole song in her mouth, gleaming and intact like a triggered memory. Later she’ll decide what it means—or not. “Questions last forever,” she says. “A lot longer than answers do.”

Fittingly, much of i don’t know who needs to hear this… was recorded live. People laughed and cried and joked and dug deep into their emotional reservoirs. People followed Sarah Beth’s lead, and the crystalline songs she’d written, and they also improvised and brought themselves to the sessions. It felt more like a community gathering than a recording session—but it was efficient and specific, as the 50 ambitious minutes of i don’t know who needs to hear this… attest. And, while Stuart Bogie, Shahzad Ismaily, Cass McCombs, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Felix Walworth, and Doug Wieselman, to name a few, each contributed a variety of sounds, even with such a large cast of players, Sarah Beth is so clearly at the center. And, importantly, it still sounds peripatetic, as are her influences: Joni Mitchell, Frank Ocean, Grouper.