This week, the Carrboro based band T. Gold is celebrating the release of their second record, Life is a Wonder and It's Cruel. It's a spirited and engaging mix of folk songs that are sometimes experimental in nature, and always super catchy.
T. Gold is the project of longtime collaborators Saman Khoujinian and Gabriel Anderson. In 2019 the duo founded Sleepy Cat Records as a means to release the first self-titled T. Gold record. Since then, Sleepy Cat has evolved into a Carrboro institution and a label known for defining a community. The majority of artists on the label are friends and collaborators and show up in each other's live bands and on each other's records.
On Life is a Wonder and It's Cruel, Khoujinian and Anderson are joined by keyboardist Joe MacPhail and bassist Alex Bingham plus other guests including Libby Rodenbough of Fust, and Mipso, and singer-songwriter Chessa Rich.
Opening track "Getting to Know the End," is ironically one about endings. Buoyed by a slinky and infectious guitar riff, Khoujinian says the lyrics came to him as he was contemplating the weight, necessity, and inevitability of endings.
"New Land" is another highlight of the record. It's a song that deals with feeling lost in a new environment. Khoujinian moved to North Carolina from Miami in 2011 to study Philosophy and Economics at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
"It's about this feeling of alienation, and it is more specifically about my feelings of displacement and alienation when I first moved to North Carolina," he said. "Having grown up in Miami, everyone kind of looks like us, but when I moved here I noticed that no one looks like us unless I specifically seek them out."
Closing out the record is a beautiful take on Peggy Seeger's version of the folk ballad "Wagoner's Lad," a song that dates back to the 1700s. Khoujinian and Anderson recorded their version as a duo at Small Pond Farm in Pittsboro.
The cover art for Life is a Wonder and It's Cruel, which was created by Anderson, has an interesting story too. It's a line-drawn interpretation of a painting by the Iranian activist and artist Bijan Jazani. A print of the original painting has been in Khoujinian's family for as far back as he can remember and has always been an important piece of inspiration for him as an artist.
"Having grown up with that painting, it kind of informed my interpretation of beauty in the world around me," he said. "It's been instructive in what I seek out when I'm searching for something nice to look at."
Life is a Wonder and It's Cruel is out now on Sleepy Cat Records.
