Sylvie – “California Hills” (feat. Sierra Ferrell)

I spent most of my life in California, which is long enough for certain hillsides to start feeling like old friends. There are stretches of hillside I've driven past hundreds of times, roads I could navigate half asleep, and certain shades of late-afternoon sunlight that can make me homesick before I've even realized what I'm looking at. From the Pacific Coast Highway to Laurel Canyon, even the most familiar scenery can bring back a memory you weren't looking for. Some are beautiful. Others are harder to revisit. Sylvie's “California Hills,” featuring Sierra Ferrell, understands that distinction with a tenderness I wasn't entirely prepared for.

The song begins as the sun disappears behind the hills, leaving the windows of distant houses glowing gold. Someone is singing a familiar song. The Santa Ana winds move through the landscape. Inside, a fire is lit, the blinds are drawn, and the radio stays on. It's an almost painfully peaceful picture, the sort of evening that might have belonged to a dozen different years. And that's the problem. The person who once shared it is gone, but the view hasn't changed. The neighbors are still home. The lights still come on. The sun has the audacity to set right on schedule. Even grief can't persuade the world to stop being beautiful.

Sylvie is the project of Los Angeles musician Ben Schwab, whose new album, New Season, arrives via Ghostly International with contributions from Ferrell, Courtney Marie Andrews, Alex Amen, and a collection of musicians from Los Angeles and Nashville. Recorded primarily in Schwab's home studio and completed at Abbey Road, the album draws from the folk and soft-rock traditions of the '60s and '70s. “California Hills” carries that history in its gentle acoustic arrangement and unhurried harmonies, with Ferrell's unmistakable voice out front and Schwab's harmonies accompanying her. There's a faint front-porch quality to the whole thing, as though someone has pulled up a chair at the end of a long day and started singing about a loss they've never quite learned to explain. Nobody is in a hurry to finish the conversation.

And then comes the question that undoes me. Ferrell sings about learning to keep moving forward without this person, offering the familiar reassurance that time will eventually make things manageable. Then she asks, “How?” One word, and all that determination disappears. It's the question everyone politely avoids when telling someone to move on, as though the instructions might arrive separately in the mail. The song eventually stops asking, closing with the quiet repetition of “That's all there is.” No answer, no dramatic breakthrough. Just the acknowledgment that someone is missing, and the life surrounding that absence continues. Having spent most of my life in California, I know those hills will be there whenever I return. What I can't know is whether they'll make me feel closer to the life I remember or remind me how much of it has changed. “California Hills” makes room for both possibilities, and I think that's why it hurts so beautifully.