Album Preview: Hectorine’s Ethereal and Ambitious “Arrow of Love”
Photo credit: Emily Dulla
At first blush, Hectorine’s latest album, “Arrow of Love,” is an epic tale of adventure.
Dreamed up by Oakland songwriter Sarah Gagnon, the sole creative force behind Hectorine, the record recounts the heroic saga of Inanna, a warrior goddess from Sumerian myth who travels through hell, is betrayed by her sister, suffers demons and is ultimately redeemed.
It is the stuff of legends, but peer a little closer, and this fantastical fable feels eerily familiar. The story catalogs dramatic lows and soaring highs—victories and defeats, tears of joy and tears of sadness. In short, it sounds an awful lot like modern love.
“This is clearly a breakup album,” said Gagnon. “I don’t know if I was conscious of it at the time, but that’s just how my brain works. I’m not a mathematician—one of the ways I connect with the world is through myth. Those ancient archetypes and stories are how I’m able to relay my emotions. There is a lot of death in this tale. But not to be incredibly dramatic, but every relationship ending is a kind of death. This album is about finding strength and agency in your life while mourning what’s gone.”
On May 23, Gagnon will release “Arrow of Love” through Take a Turn Records, an imprint run by local musicians Ray Seraphin and Luke Robbins. The second single from that album, “Everybody Says,” is out today.
Expressing loss through allegories and metaphors is nothing new for songwriters, but Gagnon conveys yearning and heartbreak on an ambitious scale rarely attempted by artists. It’s a bold move and one that pays obvious dividends, as the listener feels transported to another world entirely—an evocative, folkloric place, where everyday emotions take on heightened, larger-than-life meanings.
The narrative sketched out by Gagnon provides the roadmap for this powerful excursion, but what makes “Arrow of Love” seem truly fantastical is the ebullient sonic touchstones that power the album.
Borrowing from the dreamy airiness of Fleetwood Mac’s later discography, the dramatic flourishes of Kate Bush, and the symphonic movie soundtracks of classic 80s movies, the album feels both medieval and alien—the score from a distant, foreign world. Tinkling synths and billowing waves of sound provide a warm, lush ambiance to the album, with ornate instrumentation—glockenspiels and marimbas are featured prominently—imbuing “Arrow of Love” with an apocryphal, mythical atmosphere.
“’Labyrinth’ was definitely an influence—we were going for that kind of sentiment,” said Gagnon. “We recorded this album at [Producer] Geoff Saba’s studio, and he had this Korg Wavestation that just added some dreaminess to everything. Whenever we were stumped, we would sprinkle in a little bit of the Wavestation. It created this new age kind of vibe to the album, which is what we were going for.”
Like the undulating intonations of the Wavestation, the album is pitted and pocked with high and lows, with Gagnon using Innana’s perilous flight as an avatar for her own relationship challenges.
The album starts off with “Is Love An Illusion,” a glittering disco number that sets the terms for the conflict, punctuated by Gagnon’s heartbreaking query—“tell me baby/how did we lose our love.”
From there, the emotional rollercoaster picks up velocity, plummeting to a nadir with “No Hallelujah,” a puckish reimagining of Leonard Cohen’s classic hymnal, where Gagnon and her ex compare themselves to redeemed martyrs like Joan of Arc.
“It’s not like I sat down and set out to write a homage to Leonard Cohen, even though he’s one of my favorite songwriters of all time—this kind of just happened,” said Gagnon. “I love that he’s written about Joan of Arc before, and I know you can’t have a song title with ‘Hallelujah’ in it that doesn’t make people think of him. But fundamentally, this song was about a suffering competition between lovers. Like—who has endured the most. With that song, the descent really starts on the album.”
From the depths of that noble penance, Gagnon slowly leads the listener on a journey back to the surface, cataloging moments of fearlessness, bravery and self-love, a trek that reaches its peak in the album’s penultimate track, “Take a Chance With Me.” A beautiful cacophony of strumming acoustic guitars, whirring synths and plinking glockenspiel notes, “Take a Chance With Me,” is the Beach Boys reconfigured for an 80s child—a Wall of Sound for Millennials.
Hopelessly optimistic, the track is a reminder of what truly makes “Arrow of Love” special: Gagnon’s emotive, powerful and striking voice. While the lyrics detail an unforgettable story and the sound carries us to a wholly unknown world, Gagnon’s delivery is what provides the emotional foundation and anchor of the album.
It would be a glorious sendoff to the project—a happy ending that chronicles the rebirth of self-ownership with Inanna’s Phoenix-like emergence from the ashes. But, as we all know, love is not that simple, and the album closes with “Slip Through My Fingers,” a sorrowful lamentation of lost opportunities.
“I wanted it to be true to life,” said Gagnon. “That song is about fear in a lot of ways, and whether that fear is serving you or not. I don’t think it’s necessarily a pessimistic ending. It’s more ambiguous, like life.”
It’s a fittingly amorphous conclusion to a universal creed—existence is a hard, difficult slog, but each journey’s end represents the beginning of something new. That holds true, whether you’re a warrior goddess or an Oakland songwriter.