Peter Salett - Suite for the Summer Rain / 2CD set

Peter Salett is a singer/songwriter, film composer, and actor based in Brooklyn, New York. Over the course of nine previous albums, Salett has cultivated a singular voice defined by impressionistic, emotion-forward writing and an understated vocal delivery. His music has been praised as “simple but not simplistic… with a Zen-like economy” (Rolling Stone), “atmospheric, sepia-toned” with a “cinematic quality” (Variety) and the work of a “winsome pop poet” (The New York Times).

Salett's 10th and 11th albums, arrive in the form of two suites — Suite for the Summer Rain and Dance of the Yellow Leaf — via Dusty Shoes Music. Issued together in physical format but as separate digital releases, both works were written, sung, and performed by Salett, and co-produced with longtime collaborator Jeff Hill.

Within these intertwined works, Salett braids his evocative balladry with Chris Carmichael (Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw)’s sweeping string arrangements, along with ambient sounds from the natural world. They were conceived and recorded over the span of six years, between 2012 and 2018. The albums feature pianists Thomas Bartlett and Jason Lindner; French hornist Rob Jost; harpist Erin Hill; drummer, percussionist, and vibraphonist Bill Dobrow; and Jeff Hill himself on bass.

These song cycles, hung together via interstitials, are deeply informed by Salett’s cinematic bona fides. He contributed “Heart of Mine” to 2000’s Keeping the Faith and “A Taste for Love” to 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. “I think that those cinematic experiences gave me the confidence to essentially create the music for this piece,” he says, “and then score it with the ocean, wind, and rain sounds.

“And these pieces started at a time of great emotional upheaval for me,” Salett reveals, citing a loss close to his heart. “It was my way of trying to process what was going on.” Part of this had to do with letting go, eschewing the metronome, and giving the rhythms over to nature. Highlights like Suite for the Summer Rain’s “Waitin’ on a Rainstorm” and Dance of the Yellow Leaf’s “Vision of the Sky” inhale, exhale, ebb, flow, and sway to elemental cadences.

After the instrumental “Opening Winds and Overture,” Suite for the Summer Rain properly opens with the devastated “House of Sand.” “Look beyond the house of sand / Before the world crumbles blind/ And there’s just no more time,” Salett sings. “It’s about the temporal nature of life,” he reveals. “How a house of sand is easily washed away — and the shock of learning just how quickly it’s gone.”

About the exquisite “Waitin’ on a Rainstorm”: “I can picture being in my old apartment — that feeling when the air starts to get heavy and change,” Salett reflects. “Your body knows that it’s going to rain before your eyes see anything.” He describes “Ringing of the Bells” as “a plea… longing for a world that can never exist, where the flowers never darken in anybody’s door.” “Against the Grain” is about “the shock of death — someone you know having passed away, and trying to search for a way forward.” “Wide eyed / Why die?” he sings penetratingly. “Wide-eyed / Child cries.” The following track, “Crashing the Sound,” considers the other side of the veil: “It’s about a vision of a ghost floating into space, and still feeling the presence of someone who’s departed.”

Anyone who’s tasted grief will grasp the psychological thrust of “Underneath the Waves”: “Faces through my mind, escaping memory / Replacing how it is with how it ought to be,” Salett sings over aching, searching fingerpicking, the swell of the string arrangement suggesting inner bargaining and negotiation. “Ghost Above My Bed” refers to an experience at 17, when Salett awoke to behold an apparition overhead: “I was trying to make sense of that experience,” he says.

Does he believe in the paranormal? “Not as a matter of course,” Salett adds with a smile. “But I believe there are all sorts of ways we’re connected to things that have happened before. When someone walks out of a room and you walk into it, I believe that the energy remains. I don’t dismiss it all out of hand.”

Before the closing “Overture Reprise,” “A Light Escapes the World” transports the listener to “a tiny motel where time began / From a winter so bright to evening sands.” “It’s the feeling of beginning the process of moving on,” the artist explains, relating it to the view of light from long-dead stars. “Plainly speaking about someone moving up to the stars, into the astral plane.”

Accordingly, while Suite for the Summer Rain addresses sorrow’s blast crater, Dance of the Yellow Leaf is absorbed in new beginnings, and an embrace of transition. This second suite begins with the sumptuous overture “A Walk in the Park,” leading into “Open,” about an experience traversing the Brooklyn Bridge. “Feeling that sense that life still had a lot of directions yet to potentially go in,” he adds, “and trying to maintain a sense of wonder about it.”

“Suddenly the Leaves” contains what could be Salett’s favorite line across both releases: “All will be remembered / All is left to come.” “All of a sudden, we’re in a new world. We’re in the autumn. The air is different,” he goes on to describe. “Our roles in life are different.” “Vision of the Sky” continues the theme of transformation — this time, through the lens of the ever-reshuffling Brooklyn skyline, and the haunting sound of the winds whistling through an unfinished tower.

“The Apple and the Tree” tenderly opens a window into fatherhood — Salett’s young son boarding the school bus for the first time, with all the attendant emotions. And as relentless, irreversible change is concerned, “Woman in the Kitchen” finds gratitude amid the maelstrom. “Dancing a Life” is about “the quiet time in the evening with a partner, feeling like you’re in step with them.”

After the interstitial “Shadows Fall,” “Yesterday’s Grace” briefly gazes backward to a more innocent time. But the closer, “Regeneration,” feels like a fitting counterargument: that growth and decay are two sides of the same coin. “In a certain sense,” Salett says, “the circle has been completed.”