Album Review: the garden by sahn
On her second album, the Vallejo singer drags self-help language off the wellness poster and into the dirt, where digging up roots is labor and boundaries have a groove.
Vallejo retains a certain depth, from which Sly Stone used to sing gospel, Mac Dre created a dialect, and H.E.R. performed her name on arena stages. sahn takes a quiet corner of the same city, from which her 2023 debut, the mornings, sounded out with a complete visual album. Roots, weeds, mirrors, and morning prayer shape this second work, the garden, which is designed by the language of self-development: manifestations and healing tonics. In fact, she warbles the advice in a very literal sense, as the process itself, painstakingly—on hands and knees, in time.
She chants the instructions for “change your life” while a solid rhythm of keys, bass, and background vocals presses on, and they’re straightforward. “You’ve got to dig up all the roots, or it’ll just grow right back,” she warns, and the digging is internal first, because your “thoughts are what you’re made of, and how you think is how you pray.” It all comes together around the voices of her chorus, which fill the gaps with their agreement, but the message gets smaller and more intimate in “take care (roots).” This one carries similar themes but on a smaller scale, with a less accented rhythmic pulse, more emphasis on the lyrics. In the space of plucking out the weeds and clearing the old fruit, she advises “A hundred heartbreaks couldn’t break me,” “Never let a lame nigga play me,” and the hardiest line in either track comes when she imagines a card table in front of her. “Shuffle all the cards, but it’s still the same deck,” says sahn—rearranging the life and the change of life are not the same thing, and she knows it.
To make space for the digging, she has to make room for her own nerves, and she shares these too, in a contrary way: “Tell me what to do, I do the wrong thing.” Helpless about it all in the same breath, her “Just can’t help myself” gets overlaid as part of the rhythm of the drums on “tick tick boom,” which bounce and reset this pattern with equal energy. Kayhan Azadi’s supplied rhythm keeps interrupting and renewing the cycle, and her anxiety has no particular target, because everything is out of control. “safehouse” makes the whole thing sound like a slow lateral movement, with softer keys and a switch to second person, “You won’t leave/You’re afraid/Need control/So you just stay ‘til you’re ready to come out.” Healing, in her version, “looks like crying,” and the comforting space she cannot escape is “your cage.” For someone trying to envy her life from the outside, she has a caveat: “But I know behind the curtain I’ve failed a thousand times/Probably ten times as much as you’ve even tried.”
The home territory has not disappeared, either, because a scratch makes the hook sound in, “You can take the girl out of Vallejo” gets chopped off the turntable and thrown back before the phrase completes itself, and “vallejo” picks up momentum with a cruising Bay rhythm, as sahn raps, “In the Bay we go dumb, I got next/Quick with the flows, subtle with the flex.” The flexes are all inside the borders of a gardener in repair, “Quicker with the toolie but I pray I never need to,” and the limits are stated as physics, “Energy a force field and you ain’t getting through.” Dani Isaily’s guest appearance picks up the map, pointing to Chicago and Puerto Rico, “You know my nigga Puerto Rican, I call him Papi/He from the Hill, we from Chicago,” and meets the flex for flex, “I truly am the blueprint, I got the tools, I got the drill.”
She advises on “say less,” to “celebrate the win, but don’t talk too loud,” with the drums upfront and the bass locked in, another complete course of media coaching for everyday life. Don’t explain yourself, don’t tell your plans “to people who won’t understand.” In “lock in,” it all gets folded into four imperatives, “Lock in/Pray up/Head down/Cake up,” and the same set of manifesting fundamentals gets broken down to street level, “Keep my anxiety at bay/Calm my nerves and meditate.” One space in the production allows her to scan an empty ring, wondering rhetorically if somebody please point her to the competition.
But somewhere in the middle, the discipline gets away on “same old me,” with a bigger set of drums and bass, and background stacks, as she finds herself caught up in the cycle again after hearing “that familiar voice just when I thought I changed,” the contours of the phrase circling around the habit. In the middle of it all, she turns back to face herself, “I’m looking at my own face in the mirror/Tunnel vision, blurry vision getting clearer.” All the excavation and pruning and manifesting get folded into one statement about prophecy, “Connecting all the pain, the sunshine and the rain is the only way the garden’s gonna grow.” But the garden needs the rain too, and she has been growing it, as a gardener with weeds she knows well: this one is worth listening to.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “change your life, vallejo,” “same old me”