Premiere: Kaley Lane Eaton Reinvents “pieces (remix)” in a Whole New Way

Unconfined by genres and musical classifications, perhaps the best part of Kaley Lane Eaton and her artistry is that she can be whatever kind of musician she wants to be on any given day. That’s the versatility you’ll experience listening to her debut full-length record, cedar, released this past February.

You’ll also hear it on this brand new version of “pieces,” a reinvented rendition of the piano-based ballad that you hear on the record. With the remix, gone are the delicate piano chords, with a myriad of electronics and an electro beat appearing in their place. It’s a different side to Eaton, illustrative of the full range of her artistry, differentiated from her background as a conservatory-trained classical pianist and singer.

Expressing her intentions with wanting to remix “pieces,” Eaton shares:

“My goal with cedar was to create a songbook of sorts, with songs as skeletons that could wear flesh of different genres depending on context: folk, IDM, experimental, jazz, and many more. Remixing ‘pieces,’ the first song that inspired the album, from its piano ballad origins into a waltz-on-the-floor sad dance jam was an easy choice: it is literally about shapeshifting, reinvention, and rediscovering identity.

“I wanted the remix to express the ecstatic joy, rather than the trepidation, that comes with rebirth, with thick, expressive vocal harmonies, over-the-top sidechaining and a wild ring modulator processing Tom Baker’s slow, psychedelic guitar improvisations. This is a song to dance to in the dead of the night, just before you reach exhaustion, releasing everything, embracing purification and clarity.”

Artwork for the album ‘CEDAR’ by Kaley Lane Eaton

A musical force for sure, when she’s not recording or performing, Eaton is an Associate Professor of Music and Director of Music Technology at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. She got interested in electronic music after a period of time playing the Baroque lute, and it has just grown since then, with the compositions becoming more eclectic. They are defined by a focus on harmony, improvisation, storytelling, and emotion. Eaton masterfully combines modern digital technology with ancient performance practices, which create a truly unique sound.

cedar is a collection of eight new electro-chamber pop songs that all tie together thematically. It was very much influenced by the circumstances within which it was written. Eaton began the writing and recording process in the worst of the COVID lockdowns, as well as the catastrophic west coast wildfires of 2020. Thematically, the songs tie together the loss of a mother, the loss of societal intuition, to the loss of our natural environment that we together face as a people. There’s a distinctive Pacific Northwestern quality to the aesthetics of the record; a certain solitude, delicateness, and destructiveness. It’s the sound of an artist changing and adapting, not just from album to album but from song to song.