When I meet Alex Sauser-Monnig, the musician who performs under the name Daughter of Swords, it’s been two days since President Trump declared “Liberation Day” and levied tariffs on imports from every country in the world. Sauser-Monnig’s new record on local label Psychic Hotline, Alex, a playful and sometimes rollicking pivot from their mellow acoustic origins, is due out in a week.
As we talk on a bench beside Durham’s Ellerbee Creek Trail, seated under cascades of wisteria blossoms, the S&P 500 loses hundreds of points on the way to one of its steepest declines since 2008.
I mention Liberation Day, and Sauser-Monnig laughs. They have worked many part-time jobs over the years to support a career in music, and those places of past employment could not be farther from the world of Wall Street: goat farm, flower farm, public library. Most recently, they started an upholstery business.
So when it comes to bull runs and bear runs, Treasury yields and basis trades, a line from the jangly single “Money Hits” best describes Sauser-Monnig’s outlook on the present absurdity: “Does it matter anyway?”
It does matter, of course, whether we like it or not, and Sauser-Monnig acknowledges as much on Alex. “We need that money though / Without we won’t get very far,” they sing over the energetic pop beat on “Money Hits.” While writing the album, “paying the bills, or not being able to, was very much on my mind,” they say.
There are moments of real earnestness on the album—“Morning in Madison,” “Willow,” and “Song” all embrace the tender, forlorn romance that characterized Sauser-Monnig’s previous releases—but Alex’s defining mood is a kind of cheerful cynicism and hedonism. In “Vacation,” for instance, Sauser-Monnig indulges in a White Lotus–like fantasy of a tropical getaway with a lover, complete with “hummingbird yellow daquiris in the sun.” Frank discussions of sex abound on “Hard On,” and on “Money Hits,” cash gives as much as it takes: “We won’t need anything / When the money hits.”
“Capitalism has always felt like a joke,” Sauser-Monnig says. “It is really funny, and it is so deadly serious. The punch line is on poor people, and the punch line keeps getting so much more severe on a daily basis.”
Capitalism has always felt like a joke. It is really funny, and it is so deadly serious. The punch line is on poor people, and the punch line keeps getting so much more severe on a daily basis.”
As Sauser-Monnig and I sit beneath the wisteria, the conversation turns from the farce of Liberation Day to the tragedy of the Great Recession. The 2008 financial crisis— “the beginning of modern life as we know it,” they say ruefully—hit when Sauser-Monnig was a senior at Bennington College. Unemployment peaked in the months following their graduation. But Sauser-Monnig was on a different path, having formed the folk trio Mountain Man in early 2009 alongside fellow Bennington students Amelia Meath and Molly Sarlé.
The group’s angelic vocal harmonies, honed at house shows, quickly attracted a devoted following. Under the pall of economic collapse, they found themselves packed into a Prius, touring the country. Two years later, they toured the world with Feist.
That Sauser-Monnig would end up a musician seems almost predestined. Their parents owned a music store in Minneapolis, where Sauser-Monnig grew up.
“I’ve always been really interested in the craft of songwriting,” they say. “I remember sitting down with my dad and being like, ‘How do you write a song? What is this thing that’s so magical?”
At the end of this month, after more than a decade in the Durham area, Sauser-Monnig is moving back to Minnesota to be closer to their parents and their partner. Alex, which arrives at a time of significant personal change, also captures a years-long period, punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Sauser-Monnig found new strength in their relationships and reckoned with their gender identity.
The new record will surprise anyone familiar with Sauser-Monnig’s 2019 solo debut as Daughter of Swords, Dawnbreaker, which predated these personal and world-historical shifts. “I wrote those songs singing very quietly to myself,” they say of the 2019 album, which is full of pretty folk harmonies and country-inflected ballads.
Alex, on the other hand, was the product of a close, dynamic musical collaboration with Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, whom Sauser-Monnig describes as their “two best friends.” (Sanborn is credited on every track but one; Meath co-wrote two songs on the album.)
Sanborn’s wizardry in the realm of “beeps and boops,” to use Sauser-Monnig’s description, gives the album much of its infectious bounce. The production and instrumentation—streaks of electric guitars, jolts of drum programming—also seem to have set Sauser-Monnig’s voice free. It stalks over Alex like a big cat, sometimes soft, sometimes snarling, always powerful. On “Dance,” it stretches and cracks with newfound confidence.
The plangent lead vocals on “All I Want Is You” nearly obscure Meath’s vocal harmonies—a carryover from the duo’s past collaborations. Listening to the song’s chorus, you can almost see the object of Sauser-Monnig’s affection walking in slow motion into a crowded bar: turned heads, a stolen glance.
Alex takes cues from a wide range of genres. On “Willow,” for instance, TJ Maiani’s swinging brush patterns on the snare drums consciously emulate the warm jazz percussion of the Vince Guaraldi Trio. While writing and recording “Hard On,” Sauser-Monnig took inspiration from 1980s British singer Robert Palmer, and “Strange” has more in common with the Talking Heads than with Sauser-Monnig’s previous work on Mountain Man. “I feel strange,” Sauser-Monnig sings on the track, “but it’s just a natural reaction to a world coming apart at the seams.”
The result of Sauser-Monnig’s musical and personal discovery is an album that is remarkably attuned to the sounds and feelings of the present moment.
“The earnestness of protest music in the ’60s had its place, and it was appropriate to the moment,” they say, “but there’s no way to make a record that feels totally relevant that’s acoustic-guitar-based. I mean, I’m sure that there is, but I wanted to get away from that being the basis of the record. Before recording any acoustic guitar, I would ask the question, ‘What could do that instead?’ And it opened up so much room for other sounds.”
Those new sounds have proved to be useful tools for expressing new ideas, particularly about social ills like class inequality and climate catastrophe—realities that Sauser-Monnig feels any artist who aims to be a “citizen of the world” must wrestle with.
“I wrote a happy-sounding record about the death of humanity on planet Earth,” they say. The last song on Alex, “West of West,” imagines a family driving through wildfires toward some “last retreat” from the havoc we have wreaked on the world.
Sauser-Monnig sings softly over a mournful sequence of piano chords and a pulsing saxophone. The family doesn’t make it: “Smoky skies, burning heat / Melted rubber on the ground.” All that’s left in the end are “waves crashing on the beach, wind blowing through the trees.”
“I have a hard time saying the world is dying,” Sauser-Monnig says. “I don’t want to give up on it, but it feels like we’re Thelma & Louise–ing toward the cliff.” For those who haven’t seen Ridley Scott’s 1991 film, it ends with the titular duo driving over the side of the Grand Canyon. There is probably no better mascot for Alex than that turquoise Thunderbird, suspended triumphantly in midair.
Sex and extinction, joy and finances—all of these things manage to cohere on the album.
“There’s so much darkness, and there’s also this fragment of me that’s weirdly cheerful,” Sauser-Monnig says. “Like, is this the moment when we burn everything down?”
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