See You Tomorrow is so small and quiet, it is majestic. It is a sunlit daydream, snug in your book-lined living room or safe on your Sunday drive, where Karen Peris’ magical voice carries hope and empathy and healing. And it is arguably the trio’s best record since 1999’s Birds of My Neighborhood with numerous tracks rivaling ruminative classics like “Lakes of Canada.”
The trio of spouses Karen and Don Peris (guitar) and Mike Bitts (bassist) may be the most important but unheralded folk musicians of our time, to say little of their influence in mainline Christian circles in the vein of Sufjan Stevens or Denison Witmer. Over the past 30 years, the Lancaster, PA musicians have released 12 intimate albums together. Recorded in the Peris basement and dining room, See You Tomorrow’s production is homespun and beguiling, delicately highlighting every guitar strum, piano chord, organ drone, and drum brush.
The Innocence Mission’s songs always revel in the quotidian, the enchanted things you can see and hear and touch. Peris sings about playing guitars in the home, walking in the wondrous air, speaking with loved ones, and remembering paintings in churches. There are coats, skies, fields, spires, lakes, stones, chairs, and boats. There are conversations and secrets and riddles. It is all understated and thrilling.
The emotionally vivid subjects may draw tears on first listen. During standout track “On Your Side,” Peris dreams about her dead mother, where she is in Paris and sipping coffee and smiling.
She’d say, the light is bright around you now
I’m always on your side
When I first shared the song with Shelley, it was precisely what she needed, an affirmation from above and a simple balm that stirred up deep yearning for her own departed mother.
Likewise, when Peris sings see you tomorrow on “The Brothers William Said,” it is one of the most hopeful things recorded this year, seemingly sweeping away our fraught isolation with beautiful violin crescendos. Don’t pay attention to them, okay? she sings.
Does not go unrecognized,
has not refused to shine
in this most difficult time.
It is another precious prayer on a record filled with them.
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