Golden Apples is a prolific group of musicians formed and heralded by singer and songwriter Russell Edling. Shooting Star, their fourth album, is a sprawling new work packed to the brim with playful eccentricities and dynamism, one that owes as much of its inspiration to mid-century folkies like Michael Hurley and Karen Dalton as it does to alt rock of the nineties like Yo La Tengo and Stereolab. The album is a constellation of influences, experiences, and reckonings–with the state of the world, with others, with creativity, and with oneself.
Shooting Star follows Bananasugarfire, Golden Apples "relentlessly inspiring" (Paste) 2023 release. This time around, Edling sought to deconstruct his creative process by centering collaboration instead of a more solitary pursuit in songwriting, even as personal matters made isolation a more natural instinct. He describes taking time to make notes of the ways, timing and forms in which songs came to him in the process of demoing the record, and regularly questioning if his approach was like that of “watching a pot of water boil” or waiting for a bolt of light to appear in the sky. No two songs were created in the same way. Instead of holing up in a recording studio, the creation of the record was formed by a patchwork of collaborations in a variety of recording locales, all which were later alchemized by mix engineer Matthew Schimelfenig.