Three years after the release of its debut album, Girls Underground, Oakland indie folk duo Eight Belles returns with this self-titled follow-up on Saint Rose Records (David J, Emily Jane White). Singer Jessi Phillips, guitarist Henry Aloysius Nagle, and engineer Ross Harris (Emily Jane White) tracked the album over three years, enlisting a cadre of prominent Bay Area musicians including singer/ pianist Joel Robinow (Once and Future Band, Howlin’ Rain), drummer Shaun Lowecki (Painted Palms), bassist Jonathan Kirchner (Con Brio), and singer Katie Colver (Cave Clove). The result is a collection of highly personal material with more daring and ambitious arrangements than those on Girls Underground. “The last record definitely had kind of a sonic theme to it, whereas this record is more of a collection of pop songs that are fairly independent of each other,” says Nagle. “We really approached each song individually, using the most appropriate players for each one.” The songs may have a great deal of sonic variance, but they are joined by a common theme — the mining of the past for ideas of how to proceed in the future. The first single “Darkness in Me” tells the “mostly true but somewhat metaphorical” story of Phillips’ return to her native Michigan in an ill-fated attempt to reconnect with a past lover. “For a few weeks, I was working on a song with the line ‘my old life has become my whole life’,” says Phillips. “I never finished that song, but you could say that’s the central theme of the whole album. I think as I entered my thirties, I needed to make sense of all the important relationships of my twenties. There’s also a lot of references to home on this record, as I try to figure out where my home really is, especially as the Bay Area becomes an increasingly difficult place to live.” Americana duo Eight Belles was formed in 2010 when guitarist Henry Aloysius Nagle met singer-songwriter Jessi Phillips at a backyard party in Oakland, California where they were both performing. The pair creates music that stretches the boundaries of Americana and pays homage to a diverse range of influences including Fleetwood Mac, Harry Nilsson, and Roy Orbison. In 2012, they released Girls Underground, an album of “heart wrenching lyrics coupled with catchy tunes” (The Bay Bridged) and “vivid story songs” sung by a “siren voice” (Popdose).