Molly Parden finds inspiration in a challenge. The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist often creates constraints for herself while writing—a practice that, perhaps paradoxically, lends an expansiveness to her creativity. “Because I lived in Nashville for 10 years, I got so accustomed to formulaic songwriting,” she tells Apple Music. “It was all around me, and I grew to really hate it and think of it as mass-produced and fake and just masking as vulnerability. I really started to gravitate towards songs that don't have a classic structure to them, and whose lyrics don't necessarily rhyme, but use colloquial sentiments and names and phrases.” What isn’t unorthodox about Sacramented, her third album, is its beauty. Parden has a knack for stripping songs down to their barest elements, not unlike a poet in her concision and penchant for imagery over exposition. Opener “Wash Me in Rosemary” is quietly affecting, with Parden’s gentle vocals seeming to skate over nylon-string guitar arpeggios. “Where Do All of Our Passing Days Go” finds inspiration in Irish writer-philosopher John O’Donohue’s work, a fitting companion for Parden’s own introspective and understated aesthetic. And the title track, which actually stitches two songs together, is almost hypnotic in its slowly building momentum. Here she talks through some of the songs on Sacramented. “Wash Me in Rosemary” “It's so delicate that I knew I wanted it to stay small and delicate, so we tried to do as little arranging and orchestrating as possible. I had played this one live a few months before we recorded it, and I asked a couple of my favourite guitar players to play with me at this show. The whole show was just three nylon acoustic guitars, classical guitars. I was playing rhythm guitar for all the songs. Then my two friends took turns either playing the guitar riffs or would just double my rhythm. It just created this really lush, a bit over-the-top nylon acoustic arrangement that we took into the studio.” “Where Do All of Our Passing Days Go” “That line is actually adapted from one of my favourite books called Anam Cara by John O'Donohue. That question just arrested me when I read it. The author, John, has passed, but I wanted to do what I could to pay homage to him, because his writing means so much to me. Especially when I was writing this song in the early days of the pandemic, April and May of 2020, I was really clinging to his words. He's a poet and a philosopher, and he writes about Celtic wisdom. His writing found me in a time that I really needed it.” “Sacramented” “I remember writing the lyrics while I was driving. I was on the drive from Nashville to Birmingham a couple summers ago, in 2021. This song is actually two different songs that are smushed together because I accidentally wrote two songs using the same chord progression. Instead of making them two separate songs, I just connected them. I was really into short, lyrical phrases, trying to say a lot with very few words, and several of the lyrical lines were taken from my morning pages journals. I started writing every day at the beginning of 2021, and while every day didn't produce monumental reflections, it really helped clear the way for separate writing. I remember poring through my journals and picking out one or two lines that stood out to me that seemed to really ache with longing or to express something that I felt was yet unexpressed.” “Cigarette” “I was trying really hard to describe an encounter that I'd had with someone that was at night, that was on a rooftop, and these chords seemed really conducive to a nighttime, rooftop, mysterious encounter, but it didn't come together. I was trying to force it to be this specific moment in time. I was trying really hard to document it, and I don't know—either I didn't really want to, or it just wasn't right. I put it in the back of my mind, and I would always call it my War on Drugs song, because I wanted it to sound just like my favourite War on Drugs song called ‘Comin’ Through’. It wasn't until the pandemic, right about the time that I was writing ‘Where Do All of Our Passing Days Go’, that I revisited this song and put totally new lyrics. As long as the ends rhymed, I didn't really care if there was a story that made sense. I just wanted to rebel against creating a story.” “These Are the Times” “I tried to imagine that I was co-writing with Chet Baker. I had listened to his album Chet Baker Sings. I was heavy into that and just knew every word; I could harmonise to every song. I was like, ‘What would Chet write if he was experiencing this sort of weird heartbreak hangover?’ I came up with the first verse while I was driving. I wanted it to be playful, but really almost like a comedian. Comedians are hilarious because they are also probably really sad. They just know how to make light of life's great tragedies and the mundane and everything. I was like, ‘How can I be a comedian about how awful this feels?’ I think that's how I came up with the line ‘I wonder if you think of me, I hardly ever think of you.’”