DM Stith - Flowers & Monks EP (2024) Hi-Res

To celebrate a year of good listening, I'm sharing three unreleased songs from the Fata Morgana sessions as well as a different version of The Oracle all collected together as an EP I've named "Flowers & Monks". Kind of a supplement to "Fata Morgana," but also kind of it's own little thing.

I made "Fata Morgana" after a prompt from a film maker who asked me to write a song for her short film about suicide. Oof. How does one approach that subject? How does one create something that speaks to the most difficult parts of being human: isolation, shame, exhaustion. I'm no stranger to these feelings. I decided to create a sort of sacred space for reflection and acceptance. It struck me that the decision to end a life is a request to relinquish, somehow, time itself. For me, that meant digging out the first guitar I'd owned, rummaging around in my old CD collection for early seeds of song writing, and to let a less polished, less intellectual, younger version of myself speak. As soon as I'd set up these parameters, the songs just flowed out, one after the next. Three songs that didn't make the final tracklist, "In Flowers," "Inchworm," and "Fiery Burning Monks" were part of that outflowing. "The Oracle (String Version)" is a wholly different version from the one on the album, with strings by Marla Hansen, and featured in Grace Alwyn Ashworth's short film "GRIM," currently doing the rounds at film festivals across the US and the UK.