Ghost of a Gardener

Singer/songwriter Rachel Ries has quite the backstory. The daughter of Mennonite missionaries, Ries was raised in South Dakota by way of Zaire. Her formative years were filled with Mennonite hymns, Congolese spirituals, and the sounds of her mother singing her to sleep with songs by The Carpenters. After a yearlong hiatus, Ries recorded her third album, 2014’s Ghost of a Gardener, with Secretly Canadian Records artist David Vandervelde, who couches her quiet and subtle songs with strings and analog synths. Currently splitting her time between rural Vermont and New York City, Ries writes with one ear cocked to the sounds of modern singer/songwriters and the other ear immersed in the purity of writing from her own heart in the quiet world she knows best. She’d spent seven years in Chicago reconciling her rural, green open-fields self with the person who lived in a tiny urban apartment. Songs such as “Time,” “Ghost," and “Holiest Day” capture a solemn, restrained vibe that’s counterbalanced by the horn-supported “Where I Stand,” the country-rock inspired “Mercy,” and the indie rock electricity of “You Can Go.”