Sarah Kang’s Second Act: ‘before & after’, reviewed
On her poignant third album and her first since becoming a mother, Sarah Kang considers what makes a life well-lived.
On the final night of her “Hopeless Romantic” tour in New York City last year, Sarah Kang looked out into a crowd of fans and loved ones and admitted that she was scared.
“I’m saying goodbye not just to this tour,” she said, her voice breaking, “but to who I used to be.”
At the time, Kang was pregnant with her first child, Eloise. The “Hopeless Romantic" tour, she said, would be her last before she took a break to raise her daughter. After nearly ten years of releasing music, Kang was unsure how to approach the change. “And I’m not good with change,” she said softly.
A few months later, Kang gave birth to Eloise, and took a year off for maternity leave. This week, she released her third album, before & after, which documents who she was before becoming a parent and the woman her daughter made her into. It is an album about parenthood, but it is also about the pursuit of autonomy. Even in motherhood, Kang is determined to hold on to her identity even if she questions, sometimes, if that is possible.
I’ve always admired this frankness from Kang. Though on the surface her ideals can be traditional, they are also quite radical in the music industry, where so few musicians share her life experiences. For this, I find her an important figure: She is an artist who can speak for listeners who fail to see themselves in contemporary music.
Love can be a nerve-racking thing for Kang. It’s something that tends to make her obsess and overthink. It also makes her sick. “I confess I’m lactose intolerant,” she sings wryly on “cheeze”, a single from her debut album, about her distaste in romantic schmaltz. What surprises Kang, then, is how quickly she folds when it’s for the right person. This theme continues on the album’s new single, “i have a crush on you”. As Kang looks back to when she developed big feelings for a boy, she admits, “When you come around, even the birds I hate make a lovely sound.”
As she grew older, though, her depictions of love grew. Marriage is not really about finding “the one”, Kang intones, but about choosing the person who will witness us throughout life. I’m especially fond of how she writes about marriage in “old timers”, a song where she rolls the clock forward to 2063 and anticipates “sitting on the porch with our rockers” as she and Andrew, wrinkled and saggy, watch the neighbors go on with their lives. “We promised each other ‘til death do us part,” she cheekily warns him, “you better stay right where you are.”
Kang also recognizes that life is only enjoyable if we have people to share it with. What’s the point, she argues in “lazy afternoon”, to go to see the city lights in Paris or ride a boat in Venice, “if you aren’t there too.”
I find Kang’s observations on partnership to be particularly poignant and surprising. On “loml”, a track she recorded with HOHYUN, Kang writes beautifully about the impact Andrew has had on her life. But she sees a future where, one day, their love will mutate into grief, found in the open space lying next to them:
“Even if you happen to leave me behind
I will always be yours, and you will always be mine
Cause you are the love of my life.”
Kang is preoccupied with the idea of death and endings throughout her work. Often, it seems like she is preparing herself for an impending loss: of the girl she was, of love, and most trickily, of things that are not quite so easy to see.
before & after opens with memories of Kang’s teenage years, long before she met her husband or settled down in New York City. “summer after senior year”, the album’s opener, made in collaboration with Michael Carreon, looks back sentimentally at a time when Kang knew nothing about adult responsibilities like taxes or having kids. What stood before her was an open road of possibilities and a mixtape of all her favorite songs to soundtrack the drive. “When you’re eighteen in 2010," she remembers, “all you cared about was friends.”
Kang still sees that girl from senior year of high school, but at thirty-three years old, she begins to feel farther away from her. “goodbye and godspeed”, the track that signifies the halfway point of the album, is the emotional core of before & after. In it, Kang writes about the complicated and somewhat contradictory feelings she has as she approaches motherhood. “If you don’t forget me, I won’t forget you,” she sings to her younger self. But there is a fear here too: What if she can never be the person she once was?
Kang also writes elegiacally about the girl she grew apart from on “i miss the old me”. “There’s still a small part of me,” she says of her old self, “That’s buried underneath/the growing bags under my eyes.” In these instances, Kang’s description of time is haunting. “I don’t regret all the choices I made,” she affirms, “And if I did, what’s the use anyway?”
Eloise, Kang’s daughter, doesn’t appear until midway through with “easy to love”, but I find the most poignancy in the final two tracks, “i’ll never be loved like this again”, made with the pianist Takahiro Izumikawa, and the title track, which is my favorite. On this bright and tender song, produced by Patrick Hizon, Kang looks in amazement at her daughter. Like many parents, Kang admits, she didn’t understand what happiness was until she met Eloise. “If I could divide my life into two,” she writes of her daughter, “it would be before and after you.”
Yet in its most heart-wrenching moments, like “loml” before it, Kang looks to future loss on “before & after”. She mourns the days that are quickly passing by and how she will never get this time back. She anticipates the grief she’ll feel when she grows older and recalls small moments, like making blueberry pancakes with her family. She imagines the day when Eloise will grow old enough to leave home. “But I hope you’ll come back,” she encourages.
If life is cyclical and nothing is permanent, then Kang hopes that she can be a conduit for love. Kang knows that one day all we will have left are the memories of what it means to be loved. Until then, she chooses to spend her days building a home with Andrew and Eloise. Perhaps, she’ll choose to bake or write music. Maybe she’ll do laundry or spend a quiet afternoon with Eloise sleeping beside her. What she realizes by the end of before & after is that experiencing this kind of love is a miracle.
This, Kang writes, is the real privilege of life.
