'Forest Bees': Sheetal Singh breaks free of her shackles and explores her identity on dream-pop record
Forest Bees is set to release their self-titled debut album on June 12, a collection of wonderfully whimsical and soothing shoegaze tracks that offer a unique perspective on the experience of isolation during a lockdown.
Helmed by Sheetal Singh, the bassist for San Francisco shoegazers The Stratford 4, Forest Bees is a project that has been 15 years in the making. Singh, who found herself stifled in the largely white male-dominated world of indie rock, spent the last decade-and-a-half finding her own voice and unique sound, one that draws on her musical escapades without being fully defined by them. But for the artiste, this meant redefining everything she knew and doing it all on her own terms.
At a glance, the genesis of Forest Bees reads like standard music biz fare: A critically-acclaimed indie band has a brush with the big time, fizzles in the face of industry frustrations, and a former member goes it alone. But for Singh, "a brown woman in what is still a very white indie-rock world," as she puts it, the 15 years away meant she was returning to a whole new world. The mother of two found herself bored and uninspired with the world of shoegaze and indie-rock and soon recognized that she needed to learn a whole new way to share the music within her.
And so, Singh taught herself software she needed to make music entirely on her own, from beats and bass to learning how to sample everything from everyday conversations to the sounds her children captured on their phones. Soon, the former shoegazer found herself dabbling in a brand new world of dreamy electronic pop blended with her early indie and alternative rock influences, particularly England’s '80s and '90s 'Manchester scene', which included the likes of The Smiths, New Order, Stone Roses, and more, as well as yet another fascinating influence: the melancholic sounds of old Bollywood her mother would often listen to when she was growing up.
"My mother wanted to be a classical Indian singer," recalls Singh. "But that was not considered appropriate for an upper-middle-class Indian girl or woman, so she was married off to my father and sent to live in America." Singh, who has twice lived in England where she first learned guitar, has long struggled with an inherited sense of what is 'appropriate' for a woman of her background. And she carried these deep-seated feelings with her when she played in her first band.
Having stifled most of it in that environment, she realized decades later that she could find an outlet in Forest Bees. With a disarmingly whimsical tone despite its often detached, outsider aura, Forest Bees allows Singh to explore all the elements and layers that exist within her own sound without ever feeling the need to hide any part of her identity. And out of this new-found freedom comes a record that discusses everything from postpartum depression and loneliness within marriage to cultural expectations and humanity’s intersection with artificial intelligence.
The layered bleakness of 'Fever Dream' oozes Singh's love for London, where she wrote the song, 'Off Color', conveys the heartbreak of seeing her daughter still struggling with white standards of beauty, a generation on from her own similar insecurities, and 'Observer of Geography', written in two spells, 12 years apart, mulls the excitement of her band’s major-label signing and her imminent marriage in its first verse, followed by the dissolution of both in its second.
"The ten songs on the album are me...singing about loneliness, longing and (not) belonging," Singh explains. "Obviously, the songs were written before the Coronavirus pandemic, but it’s eerie that the themes I touch on - isolation, anxiety, feeling trapped - are shared by so many right now."
Beyond music, Singh is also the executive director of an innovation lab, and through Forest Bees, she explores the impact of technology (AI in particular) on our everyday lives and loves – for better and for worse. "We have built a world that feels cold, but our desire to connect is very real," says Singh. "These are songs about the AI-powered robot-gods who control our fates and hold our faith. About connection and isolation and the way technology fills and broadens the spaces between us."
Atmospheric album opener 'Alexa' exists in a place where humans and machines have connected into a benevolent neural network wherein the likes of Alexa and Siri have become, in Singh’s words, "angels who are looking out for us." Yet, while ostensibly dystopian, her message is nuanced, implying that humanity will prevail in concert with technology, rather than being entirely eclipsed or simply surviving in spite of it. Where 'Alexa' looks in on what isolation in a world of technological advancement looks like, 'Alone/Together' has Singh looking outward from within the space of isolation itself, gently recreating the feeling of anxiousness that underscores our melancholic lockdown existence.
Elsewhere on the album, Forest Bees explores shifting self-perceptions of motherhood on 'Hollow Bones' and the ache of desire on the first single off the album 'Golden Dream', while album closer 'Dust' is Singh's "a noisy ‘f*ck you' to the whole world."
Forest Bees' self-titled debut was produced by former Swell bassist Monte Vallier. "[He] really became my thought partner in this project," says Singh, whose reference playlist for Vallier included the diverse likes of His Name is Alive, Frank Ocean, Broadcast and Kid Cudi. "Overall, I think [Forest Bees] is the sound of real-life and the realization that the dreams we have for ourselves when we are younger may not come true," Singh concludes. "But we never fully lose hope that something better is around the corner."
'Forest Bees' is ultimately a calming and soothing record musically, and a poignant telling of deeply personal experiences lyrically. It creates a sense of nostalgia for what once was while also giving us food for thought with regards to where the world is heading and what our place in it might be. It is cynical and hopeful in equal measure, and to that end, serves as one of the most timely releases for the era we find ourselves in.
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