Recommended Tracks: “The Garden,” “Songbird,” “Moon Boy”
Artists You Might Like: Avery Lynch, Grace Enger, Ally Salort
When you’re a little kid, everything is gray. Sometimes the color hasn’t yet appeared, but you blink and everything’s changed. Singer-songwriter Devon Gabriella finds that everyone, including her, is growing and changing, but so is the garden. On her sophomore EP, The Garden, Gabriella comes to terms with changing possibilities.
The EP fittingly opens with the title track, “The Garden,” where Gabriella faces the reality of growing up in all of its heart-wrenching forms. Between changing seasons, changing perspectives and all other moving parts, the singer realizes how her life is always evolving. She sings, “In this garden, thought I found what I wanted / But I’m right back wherе I started, so cut me dry ’cause now I have to go.”
A visceral, emotionally volatile track, “Gasoline” is all about obsession, heartbreak and the extremes we go to when love turns into a battlefield. She captures still wanting someone who hurt you and being stuck between feelings, singing, “Listen, I’ve been wrestling with the bed you made / And the one I laid in I’m spiraling, I may have lost my mind.” Haunted by the fact that love is a slow burn, she dances on the edge of destruction and is unable to let go completely. She sees the repercussions as a pattern and a trap, not just something that went wrong (“This wasn’t fate but design”).
Gabriella, who once sang lovingly for their partner, finds that love isn’t always so on “Songbird.” A now-unraveling relationship, the love they share ultimately becomes unsustainable and it’s the metaphor for a songbird that takes center stage here. She now finds her voice strained, and her spirit feels caged, singing, “I was your songbird for a time / Sang you to sleep ’til the words weren’t right.” She describes how her bones feel hollow and her throat’s getting sore, and how her favorite songs aren’t hers anymore.
That is, before Gabriella continues to face life’s harsh truths — on “Moon Boy,” she realizes that the people we love who are stuck blaming the world instead of facing themselves. A portrait of someone charming, she opens the song romanticizing someone in a tragic, cinematic way — like a James Dean-type figure: reckless, emotionally unavailable and burning out too soon. This idea of burning out is expanded when she tackles the idea that some people externalize blame onto “the stars” or divine forces to avoid growth. It’s a profound, cosmic irony that forces Gabriella to absorb the chaos, and even when she wants to help, she realizes that maybe letting go is for the better.
Balancing biting lyrics with deep empathy, “Second Nature” is emotionally unflinching. It sees Gabriella tell the story of someone who loves deeply, but at the cost of who they are and their dignity. She describes someone who keeps patching holes in a sinking ship because they don’t know how not to. The song is about feeling needed, what it means when you’re painfully taken for granted and how love, while masked by good memories, doesn’t always look like love at all.
The final song, a slight departure from her previous musical sound, “Bad Blood,” focuses on what it’s like not to have closure. A thing we often so desperately need, Gabriella must come to terms with letting go of someone she cares about, which is the hardest lesson yet. A song which she has described as “cathartic,” Gabriella is left with lingering feelings and questions that will forever remain unanswered. The unknowns are a harsh pill to swallow for anyone, and Gabriella’s emotional honesty is powerful, especially as she leaves her heart on the table on the final track. Marked by a lesson that may often haunt us when we’re left without answers — without the “why” — Gabriella learns that flowers grow and die before they regrow into something else that can be magical if you let them.
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