Kira McSpice’s Saturnism began with a hypnosis session, a trance guided by her friend and breathwork facilitator Trina Merz, and what McSpice found inside that trance became the foundation for a four-album series. It’s a genuinely strange origin story, and the music matches it. Rich and fully realized, Saturnism is full of dusty laments, charred ether, and a visceral longing that stretches in every direction at once. McSpice is pulling so many strings here and somehow holds them all. Her voice stays center stage even as the songs breathe their own air, casting spells through hypnotic, ascending vocal incantations set against operatic atmospheres and beautiful, complex arrangements. This music is heavy, but it never collapses under its own weight. It just keeps opening up.
Alongside this interview, we’re premiering the video for “To Hold You,” directed by Will Ponturo. It’s anchored in a surreal sadness. McSpice is a ghostly spectator and invisible narrator of a life that slipped through her hands, with the acrobatics and fiery bombast of All Of It the Clown and Samantha Dederichs telling a strange yet familiar story against a blackened backdrop. It’s incredible.
Saturnism is OUT NOW.
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What are your earliest memories of sound? Not necessarily music (though that too!), but just a memory where you really noticed what something sounded like.
Hmm, I guess I’d have to say nap time when I was a kid. I remember in daycare, there were these little blue foam mats they would put down on the ground and have the kids lay on them to take a nap. I’m not really a nap person, so I would lay there awake and listen to the grownups whisper to each other or the air conditioner or maybe cars outside or breathing. I liked how that space sounded. It was more of a feeling of stillness and listening to what that sounded like in the middle of the day than any particular sound.
Was there a lot of music in the house growing up?
Yes! My mom was an opera singer and a violinist, my dad played guitar, and I was always practicing cello or playing piano or something. My younger sister Zoe (who’s an awesome artist and clockmaker in Boston now) played the harp as well as the violin and piano, and I’d always make her play home concerts with me. We joke about it now, but at the time, it was very intense. I was kind of psycho as a kid about that sort of thing. Actually, that hasn’t changed, but at least now I’m not harassing Zoe about it; she’s got clocks to make.
And what first drew you to playing music and, eventually, creating your own original work?
When I was 3, I went to one of my mom’s opera performances when she was in college. I saw the cellists in the orchestra pit and decided I wanted to do what they were doing. I bothered my parents about it for almost a year, and then they decided to get me a tiny cello. I got really into it and was very serious about it, played in orchestras, and took private lessons. I wasn’t very good at reading music, though, because I didn’t have the patience for it. I liked making up my own stuff. In high school, I started playing guitar and singing, and that’s when I started writing songs, but before that, I’d just mess around on the cello.
So let’s talk about the new record, Saturnism. Before making it, you worked with your friend Trina Merz, a breathwork facilitator and hypnotherapist, to help navigate your Saturn return. The session sounds like it was a genuinely strange and vivid experience. What was it actually like in the moment? Did it feel like dreaming, or something else entirely?
First off, I want to say Trina helped me open so many doors inside myself throughout those breathwork sessions. I highly recommend her to anyone needing guidance in getting to the core of themselves. I feel more myself than I have in my entire life, and I know breathwork was a huge part of getting to this place.
In terms of the trance, it was amazing. I love being in that space. In this particular trance, I felt like I was there in the desert, and then when I came to the house, I was really in the house. It was that same space I’m in when I’m dreaming, except I was able to make decisions and make my way through it in a grounded way. Like lucid dreaming but less chaotic/not constantly having to remind myself that it’s a dream, and also it was guided by Trina, she would ask me where I was, and I would tell her, and we would go from there. This trance was peaceful and felt deeply symbolic. When it was over, I knew that I wanted to create a container for each thing that had happened in it. There wasn’t actually a train into the desert, though. The trance was just me in the desert walking up to the house, going inside, exploring the rooms, and seeing the ghost. The train part I made up as the way to enter it all- that’s Saturnism. It’s the entrance into that realm.
The image of the childhood home in the trance is striking. How much of your early life and the experiences you had before leaving home in your teens ended up finding their way into Saturnism?
Not much, actually! Early life stuff really comes in with the second and third albums in the series- The Desert and The House. Saturnism was me assessing my life where it was when my Saturn return started in 2023. As it progressed, I started to dive deeper into childhood stuff. I mean, I guess there is early life stuff in it in the way that my upbringing and traumas have shaped me to make certain decisions, but I guess that could be like every album ever hahaha.
You’ve framed the Saturn return as stepping into a new room and being responsible for how it’s arranged. When you started making this record, did you have any sense yet of what belonged in that room, or were you still figuring it out?
I had no idea. I was really, really lost. I mean, I had this goal that maybe by the fourth record I would feel “lighter” since Saturnism was all about the heaviness of choice. That uh.. was not the case. I mean, I know my subconscious was saying stuff to me in that album I wasn’t even really hearing until it came out. As I continued through the series, a lot opened up, and I understood things about myself I did not understand while writing Saturnism.
Recognizing the need to be kinder to yourself is one thing. Finding a way to actually get there is another. Did the process of making this album help with that, or did it just surface more of the difficulty?
No, I was so mean to myself during the making of this album. Only now that it’s out and I see it next to the others, am I like ok I need to be nicer to the older version of me that made this, because I was feeling so lost, and that was kind of the point.
This is the first part of a four-album series. How mapped out is the rest of it? Do you have a sense of the arc, or are you letting each record determine what comes next?
The series is done! Well, I’m still working on the 4th, but the energy and lessons of all 4 were written and contained in my Saturn return. I didn’t know what to expect with each one. I just let myself work through it and then took what I learned and carried it with me to the next one. The House is definitely the biggest. I guess I knew that would be the biggest one from the beginning, since it’s about me connecting with my childhood home, I knew that’d be a lot.
Tyler Skoglund co-produced, engineered, and mixed Saturnism and has been a collaborator for a while now. What does that ongoing working relationship give you that starting fresh with someone new wouldn’t? I’m also curious, given how personal the material is, how much of that interior process did you share with Tyler while you were making the record? Does co-production require that kind of openness, or can the work speak for itself?
I tell Tyler everything. He always listens and gives me the space to talk it through. I feel like when we are in his studio and are about to record, and then I give him the story of a song and my feelings about it, it opens up the space to start working on it. I like having him be on the same page as me; it feels like there’s double the intention going into it. He’s really good that way. He adds a very grounded energy to my chaos but doesn’t stifle me. For something as personal as this, Tyler was the most obvious choice. We had just finished The Compartmentalization of Decay the previous year, and we were in a real rhythm with things. I really do love working with him; at this point, it just feels like home.
Madeline Johnston’s involvement is interesting given the territory Midwife occupies. How did that contribution come about, and what did she bring to the record?
I love Madeline’s work so much, I’m a big Midwife fan, and when I wrote “Dark Waters,” I was hearing her voice in the chorus, so I reached out. She made what I was hearing come to life, but of course in a way cooler way than I could have imagined. She also made this beautiful synth part that sounds like what dark water would look like. Pretty sick. I like the territory she occupies; it’s a very cool territory.
The string arrangements are such a beautiful and integral part of this record. How much direction did you give Sean Brennan, and how much did you leave open?
I’ve found it’s best to give Sean free rein when he’s working on an arrangement. Sometimes I have notes and direction, but it’s best to let him go off with his compositions, then work with what he’s made after his vision has been recorded. He puts all of himself into it and creates the most beautiful landscapes that exist within my concepts. I’ve been so grateful to know Sean and his process, you can hear his intention and love of his craft in his work.
When I was thinking about arrangements for the record, I decided I would write them for some of the songs- like string quartet plus trombone (then after all that’s recorded, Tyler and I add stuff on top), and then there would be some songs with just a ton of cello layers, like I always love to do. Once I had my bearings on what the instrumentation of the record was going to be, I gave Sean the three songs I knew he would really make shine. The Fig was insane. He crushed it, absolute insanity.
Will Ponturo directed the video for “To Hold You.” What’s it like handing something that personal over to him to interpret visually? Is there a different kind of trust involved there than with a musical collaborator?
Will’s style with video and directing is way different than how I would approach things, so I have to put a lot of trust into him. He likes to explore what’s naturally going on in the environment he’s filming (I like to control everything, so this was really hard for me for the first couple videos we did together, but I’ve gotten over it because he really does an amazing job). It’s all very organic, and because of that, there are lots of beautiful surprises that happen, and he’s got the eye to discern where those surprises are supposed to go in the video. I think he approaches it like one of his compositions- pieces of interesting raw stuff amidst beautiful and dramatic landscapes, always compelling and placed in an intentional way.
The video features All Of It the Clown and Samantha Dederichs. What drew you to that particular visual language for this song, and how involved were you in shaping the concept?
The only credit I can take for any of this video are the teardrops I drew on my face and the dress I picked out. Other than that, it was all Will and the “fire jam” that was thrown at his friend Lev Levison’s backyard in Savannah, GA. All these clowns and performers got together and spun fire and danced while Will had me play the song over and over on the back of Lev’s truck. It was amazing. When editing, All Of It the Clown and Samantha really stood out to Will as characters for this video; there was some kind of magic in the shots with them. They naturally became characters that told the story.
Do you have any interesting or memorable stories about things that happened when y’all were making the video?
The most memorable thing was when All Of It the Clown was fire breathing and holding the torch right next to me, and it was scary! But I loved it. I love fire.
And, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Open G on the cello, the musical saw, a choir, wind in leaves, thunder, peepers in the Spring, crickets, a creek, whispering that is directed at me (yeah, I like ASMR shut up), a full symphony orchestra going at it real loud, a train far away in the middle of the night.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
