If it weren't for the autorun glitch, Rachel Bobbittdebut album Swimming to the sand wouldn't exist. The Nova Scotia singer-songwriter explains it to me with a coy giggle over an oat milk cappuccino at Flying Books at Neverland on Queen Street West at her adopted home in Toronto one unseasonably warm October day, saying she has the technology in producer Chris Coady's car to thank for his willingness to work with her.
“When Chris connected his phone to the car, [my demos] will automatically start playing,” says Bobbitt. Cody was rumored to be stepping away from producing and focusing on mixing, spending a particularly long time working on shoegaze veterans Ryde's 2024 record. InteractionWhen Fantasy reports A&R Matt Marshall reached out on her behalf to the industry veteran who has produced such series as Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Beach House, TV on the Radio and countless others. “When we started working together, he said, 'These songs are so stuck in my head because I'd get in the car and have to listen to them.'
Regardless of technological interference in general, Bobbitt's songs stay with you forever. Inspired by Sharon Van Etten, many of those demos that haunted Cody every time he got in the car were recorded with a microKORG organ preset—”a little dinky sound,” the artist admits—but the producer's elevated version sets the tone with opening track “Don't Cry,” reminiscent of a wedding, funeral or some other vital situations; a sustained call to arms that becomes a spine-tingling motif throughout the record.
They say you have your whole life to record your first album, and Swimming to the sand (out October 17) takes it literally: Although Bobbitt has lived in Toronto for seven years and recorded the record in Los Angeles, California, it was inspired by her experiences growing up in rural Nova Scotia. She describes the scene at her nanny and Poppy's home, where there was an “open door” policy that often attracted Bobbitt's mother's seven siblings and their families. Some are swimming, others are husking corn on the veranda, drinking tea or playing air hockey in the basement.
“I think growing up there was very vibrant,” the singer-songwriter tells me, the family closeness enhanced by the picturesque backdrop. The “harsh, unforgiving, cold” nature of the Atlantic Ocean and the family dynamics forced upon it instantly recall Virginia Woolf's story. To the lighthouse. While Bobbitt admits that a targeted job posting for a lighthouse keeper literally popped up on her Instagram feed the other day, her main literary inspiration (it is a bookstore interview, after all) for the album was 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernault, who spearheaded the hybrid genre auto fiction.
“A lot of her books oscillate between the very personal and the insignificant, like This Is My Life. This has been my morning routine since I was seven years old growing up in France,” she explains. “And then on the next page she'll zoom out a lot and say, 'This is what's happening in the world right now.'
Bobbitt continues, “When I read her books, the shift—even though it was so radical—was so seamless,” adding that she learned a lot from Erno's navigation of self-insertion. On Swimming to the sandThe singer-songwriter fleshes out her stories more fully, adopting the first-person perspective she often avoids to create vivid sketches of characters outside of herself. Starting with the cosmic first single “Sweetest Heart,” she's firmly rooted in the story, but still returns back to set the scene.
Its effectiveness can hardly be overestimated. Another single, the casually insistent indie rocker “Deer on the Freeway,” reaches beyond her body, allowing us to experience the racing heartbeat and wide-eyed panic of being caught in headlights. Even when Bobbitt fades more into the background, stitching together dream sequences and mourning her nanny from afar to the brilliant, buzzing “Hands Hands Hands,” you can feel the dirt under her fingernails as she tries to hold on to the memory by interpolating the childhood folk song “Reuben and Rachel” her Poppy sang to her. When the tidal wave of vocals on “Hush” crashes into the word “eye” in the chorus, you'll be tempted to mishear it as a personal pronoun left hanging; Anecdotal specifics aside, it's like seeing the scene from a bird's eye view—perhaps even from a lighthouse tower.
Bobbitt now deals with nostalgia by admitting that she lived for visits home when she first moved to Toronto to study vocal jazz at Humber College, struggling to find her footing during her first three years away. While it has taken time for the songwriter—who now also teaches voice lessons to children and adults alike, using a radically accepting, non-rigid pedagogical approach that is largely reflected in her ability to plumb the depths of her own voice as a singer—to acclimate to the city, she is now cultivating the type of community she says she's always dreamed of.
This became clear in the lead-up to the album's release, when Bobbitt held two “shows” at Trinity Bellwoods in an effort to create an alternative to live performance with a lower barrier to entry. When I walked into the first one in early August, scores of people going about their regular Saturday afternoon activities in the park stopped to grab a free cup of coffee from Welch Coffee Co. in Liberty Village, watching spontaneous performances by Bobbitt and friends like Billianna, Georgia Harmer and Leah Pappas-Kemps. She was also joined by Justice Der, her multi-instrumentalist partner and producer in both life and music, whom she met in school and immediately began collaborating with.
“He always fills my creative gaps and vice versa,” Bobbitt explains. “I really enjoy working with him because I just feel like we never step on each other’s toes, which is really rare. I think sometimes you collaborate with other people and they kind of push you into zones that you're not quite used to, but I think with Justice it was always just unspoken and natural.”
This type of connection is necessary in a world that only seeks to drive us further apart. Recalling a conversation with a friend the day before about working in the world—in the music industry, but also more generally—and all the “overwhelming and scary parts” of it, Bobbitt says they kept coming back to how important it was for both of them to just talk to each other, face to face, as people: “I feel like a scary thing is a lot scarier when it happens at a distance and impersonally.”
For all its idiosyncrasies, Bobbitt's music is striking in its ability to bring us together. “Everyone is so busy and you're all trying to do things on your own. It's hard to get together and just share,” she recalls of gathering friends and fans at Trinity Bellwoods for these cute, informal pop-up shows. There, the third space became another opportunity for her to break the fourth wall, erasing the barrier between reality and the fictional utopian ideal of bohemian city life she had once imagined in rural isolation.
“I don’t remember the eyes now / Were they wide open or closed?” Bobbitt sings the searching song “Remember?”, bringing back that droning organ recitative in a different key. “I don’t remember the last time / You swam back.”
