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Eva Louise Goodman’s Nighttime project locates itself on a musical tree planted on the British Isles, perched atop the branch of folk leaning into sixties rock. With tempered percussion, floating mellotron, and singing that evokes Bleecker & MacDougal on a fervent Saturday afternoon, her new album Keeper Is The Heart reaches deep into the essence of musicians such as Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier and Pentangle, breaking down the decades into a sound thoroughly and bizarrely modern.

Through her years performing with Mutual Benefit, Goodman fell in love with life on the road and the collaborative energy of a band. In this third Nighttime record, she channels these experiences into her own music, putting aside lo-fi origins to invoke a new collaborative approach to bring her songs to life.

“I've always been fascinated with ‘automatic’ arts,” Goodman says, “where things are created intuitively and without premeditation, from the subconscious.” After a pandemic year immersed in isolated sound experimentation and writing, she entered the upstate New York studio of recording engineer Rick Spataro (Florist) with this thought in mind. Recording a song a day, the duo let the spark of spontaneity be their guide.

The spirit of surrender weaves through the album. “Break free from time, and sink in the pool of the mind,” begins ‘Garden of Delight’, propelled by 60’s-era organ. The file disappeared after the first day of recording and, by luck or fate, the one surviving print captured the song’s loose and free-wheeling essence and made it onto the album unaltered.

Keeper Is The Heart is a mirror to Goodman’s journey toward creative freedom. The first words she sings: “Lift the veil of all of this hate/To see the fear at its base.” Her last: “We’ll follow the fates across the great expanse of time/To the source of the light within our mind.” In between is a work of art awash in personal awakenings, reveling in the power of intuition, the lifting of veils, and the beauty of transformation.

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