We premiere Whitney Tai’s “Sleepwalking to the Moon”, a song in orbit between peace and pain.

Sometimes Whitney Tai’s music is fragile, delicate, barely entering your ears.  At other times it is fierce, dense, demanding of every one of your senses.  But either way, it touches your heart with a power that is hard to define but instantly recognizable.  “Sleepwalking to the Moon”  touched our heart, light as a feather but as sharp as a hypodermic, which is why we are delighted to premiere it.

“Sleepwalking to the Moon” was written by Tai and Andrew Kingsley with Tai’s  fragile-sharp lyrics and ageless childlike voice, “Produced by Tim Janssens and Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound in Los Angeles,  it  is another example of Tai’s sense of design in sound and her deft hand at guiding and crafting recordings that are a natural soundscape for her voice and her poetry

It is the poetry that gives “Sleepwalking to the Moon” such power beneath her fragile voice.  Wide awake and dead asleep at the same time,  she opens the song, in nine brief words that give you a life history and an interior look that is miles deep. She has to live her life, but maybe not willingly: Can I face the truth again? While the blood is running thin. Sleepwalking to the moon, she tunefully whispers over Andrew Kingsley’s perfectly pitched, simple guitar strum.  You can see her in orbit, floating between peace and pain, balanced between the earth and the moon.

“Sleepwalking to the Moon” orbits not only space but your mind.  It keeps circling, never burning up in your atmosphere of distractions,  keeping you transfixed, even as you go about your day.  “Am I  sleepwalking to the moon?”  you think as the chorus I’m a million miles away, tell my friends I’m ok, replays again and again in your mind and in your ears.  Maybe we are all sleepwalking to the moon, maybe Tai is on to something — an eternal truth.

Tai has been forced to contemplate eternal truths in her life.  She lost the person who most encouraged her creative work, traumatizing Tai for some time.  As she dealt with depression, anxiety, weight loss and fear she used the time to learn to channel the pain into poems and songs that are honest and understandable.  The result has been, for me, three years of some of the best dream pop and alt-rock  I have heard, with “Sleepwalking to the Moon” the latest in her heavenly body of work.  We are all richer for it, whether we are sleepwalking to the moon or present every moment – or both at once, as Whitney Tai seems to be able to do.

Patrick O’Heffernan, Music Sin Fronteras

Whitney Tai   https://www.whitneytaimusic.com/home 

Listen here. https://lnkfi.re/sleepwalkingtothemoon

Song written by Whitney Tai and Andrew Kingsley.
Produced by Tim Janssens.
Mastered by Greg Calbi, Sterling Sound.

Lyrics: Sleepwalking To The Moon
Written by Whitney Tai

Verse 1
Wide awake and
dead asleep at the same time
Feet uprooted,
upside down on the sky line
Counting all the clouds
that dissolved into night
Prayin to see your face in these
northern lights
And I can’t, no I can’t, no I can’t

Chorus
Sleepwalking to the moon
I’m a million miles away, tell my friends i’m still ok
Sleepwalking to the moon
Figured out a way to fly but i think i’m gunna try
Sleepwalking to the moon
Can I face the truth again? While the blood is running thin
Sleepwalking to the moon
ohhhh

Verse 2
Silly questions and
the answers escape us
Gunna take more,
than a blastoff to shake us
Now the Earth is callin, yellin hella loud
Askin, how you gunna grow while you
talk so proud?
Well you can’t, no you can’t, no you can’t

Chorus
Sleepwalking to the moon
I’m a million miles away, tell my friends i’m still ok
Sleepwalking to the moon
Figured out a way to fly but i think i’m gunna try
Sleepwalking to the moon
Can I face the truth again? While the blood is running thin
Sleepwalking to the moon
ohhhh

Bridge
Dark and hazy
Kinda crazy
That’s how I feel when I’m walkin to you
Dark and hazy
Please don’t wake me
I’d rather choose