In Conversation with Avalon Tassonyi
Avalon Tassonyi released their pandemic album, Candlelightning, in June 2023. It’s a heartfelt, well-paced folk album that resonates with humanity. Brought to life in a cabin on a family peach farm with collaborators Eliza Niemi and Eli Kaufman, as well as contributions from Cedric Noel, Nick Nausbaum, Vic Bury, and David Lavoie, Candelightning is a delightful listen that evokes simple pleasures. Avalon caught up with Cups N Cakes while on tour with Whitney K. in Europe. Time is tight on tour- our conversation ended with them walking on stage to play.
Tell me a little bit about the process of making Candlelightning. I hear you were at your family home?
Yeah, it's my mom's childhood home on a peach farm. There’s this little shack where we did the recording for this album.
It was the pandemic and we were still all locked down for the most part, but I was lucky that my bubble was basically my bandmates.
[Candlelightning] was close to live off the floor, and then we just added a few things here and there on top. We would pop over there for a few days at a time and do two or three songs at a time as little retreats for a few days.
Did you have arrangements in mind that you had written going into that, or was it a more collaborative process?
I usually just let people kind of write their own parts. Everyone’s just trying to serve the song, so it just happens naturally. I try to just have people in my band that I already trust and then I don't try to, like, control their every move.
Did you write all of the songs in one fell swoop, or was it more of a collage of songs from different times?
But it's not like they were all written in like one week or something. Probably over about a course of a year. And then I was still writing songs while we were recording it. So like, I'm pretty sure You Snuck Up On Me was like the last song that I wrote for that album. And that was like the last one that we recorded for it.
That's a cool track, love a jazzy piano ballad. Tell me about the themes in the writing of the album.
It's definitely a homecoming album, or something along those lines.
Candlelightning is not really a concept album, but if there’s a concept to it at all, it's about things that are really small and things that are really big, and how they’re the same thing, in a way. Like, something that's really small has whole world within it. And something that is really big, just contains all these small parts. So I was thinking about scale when I was writing a lot of the songs.
And that was reflected in the title of the album, too, right?
Yeah, that's kind of where the album title comes from. Something small like a candle, or something big like lightning. I tried to capture that energy, and that relationship.
That’s why I wanted to make a band album- it's my first one. I wanted to have it have more of a human spirit type sound because a lot of the music that I enjoy is like that. Especially in like genres of like rock and folk, it makes more sense to be locked in to each other instead of a time grid. Just because then you can kind of be more flowy about it.
I feel like a lot of the songs kind of trace back to “Yes or No”, [the first track on the album]. The message of that song for me is about not having so much of a results-based way of moving through life in general.
I feel like my way of thinking is very informed by Taoism and Laozi, and also a lot of anarchist thinking in terms of…I don't want to be too heady or whatever, but…not reproducing what the government or the state does. Not trying to, like, control and rule and dominate in my own creative practice. I’m more trying to find some sort of liberation through making music and building community, whether that's with my bandmates or with people who I play shows with, or people who enjoy the music.
That sounds like a very healthy approach to making art and sharing it with people.
Yeah, I'm just trying to play the long game.
Tell me about your recent release under Inland Island! What differentiates that project from your self-titled one?
I wasn't planning to put up music under that name anymore. But then I wanted to release those loft demos [as the album Songs of Niagara]. They were recorded about three years ago when I was still using that name, so it just kind of made sense to release them under Inland Island.
When I was making the first Avalon Tassonyi record I was trying to like situate myself in the context of singer-songwriter music, and it just made more sense to use my name be a part of that history, or that mode of music.
Oh! We’re playing in seven minutes.
What's your pre show like? How are you going to get your head in the game right now?
Ideally it's nice to have, like, 20 minutes before to just chill or whatever. With my own band, I like to really get on the same page as everybody. But this is our 14th show as this tour. We're so deep in it that we can just go out there and it’s gonna be great.
- Sophie Noel