Art Pop, Myth, and Resurrection: Hectorine Returns With ‘Arrow of Love'

On her third album Arrow of Love, Hectorine's Sarah Gagnon re-emerges with what feels like a triumphant return while pushing pop forward. The record takes cues from the Sumerian goddess Inanna, whose descent into the underworld mirrors the chaos and renewal of Gagnon's own last few years. Leaning into the art and progressive pop realm, the music is rich and kaleidoscopic with 12-string jangle, glowing organ and synths, and Gagnon's earthy voice which really carries the weight of the stories here. Like some of the best records, Arrow of Love doesn't just reflect a moment in time; it creates its own world. Digging deeper, we chatted with Gagnon who tells us all about the beginnings of Hectorine, turning some heavy feelings into transcendent melodies across her new album, and its narrative arc rooted in myth and personal transformation.

Hot Sounds: Where did you grow up and how did you get into playing music?

Sarah Gagnon: I grew up in a small town in North Central Massachusetts near the New Hampshire border. It's a classic New England town in the sense that there's a town common, where the cows used to graze, in the middle of a ring of churches. On Thursday evenings in the summer they still have band concerts, which is about the only social game in town. I was never in band, though. I played violin as a child for many years but I didn't devote myself to it — I hated practicing, as well as my violin teacher, a humorless Romanian woman who made me keep my nails so short they would bleed — and I never got any good. Eventually I quit. But I sang in the choir from grade through school, and I was absolutely ravenous when it came to listening to music, though I didn't really have a lot of guidance in the department. I felt like Anais Nin must've felt when she went to the library, just going through the card catalog alphabetically. I also always loved reading literature and writing. I wrote a lot of poetry in my youth, most of which I've burned, but I think that practice prepared me for writing lyrics. I didn't come from a family of artists or musicians — and my father listened to more NPR in the car than anything else, although he always harbored a love for Joan Baez — but my mother loved classical music and listened to it all the time. She also took us to the local symphony whenever she could. I remember being all dressed up next to my little sister and falling asleep and being jolted awake by the crash of cymbals. I was bored by it at the time but it must've moved something in me because I ended up gravitating towards classical music — I'm using the term "classical" loosely here, in that it encompasses the baroque as well — in my twenties. When I moved to Boston after college I sang in a classical choir and we performed a lot of strange and interesting pieces as we focused on rarely performed works. We did Britten's Ceremony of Carols, Stravinsky's Mass of 1948, pieces by Berlioz and Bach that I'd never heard of. All my friends at the time hated coming to my performances. I don’t think that would be true of my friends now. I also studied abroad in Salamanca, Spain my junior year of college and fell desperately in love with a man from Seville named Jose Manuel who was studying at the school of Fine Arts with my roommate Esmeralda. I used to borrow Esme's guitar from time to time though I couldn't play it at all — and then one day he shows up with this nylon string guitar and I start yelling at him because I knew he'd spent his entire monthly stipend and wouldn't have any money left over for food. But I was touched, too. That was a pivotal moment for me. To have my own guitar to learn on. But it took me a very long time for me to gather the courage to play guitar in public, to start writing songs, to call myself a musician. There came a time when I couldn't go to shows anymore — it was too painful because I knew I had to find a way to be up there. So I stopped going to shows and I focused on writing and recording my songs, and I started playing out, solo at first, and then I got a band together. And I guess the rest is history. 

HS: What's the story behind the Hectorine moniker? Also did you play in any groups prior to 2019's debut? 

SG: Before my paternal grandmother died, I told her I would name my firstborn child after her. I honestly can't remember why I would've done that since I'd never planned on having children, so when the time came when I knew this project would need a name but I didn't want to use my own, I chose hers as a way to keep my promise to her. A creative project is definitely a type of child: there's conception, gestation, birth. Prior to the 2019 debut, apart from choir, musicals, and singing in my high school's Top 40 concert, I had only ever sung in Halloween cover bands — Stereolab, Eurythmics' In the Garden. I did Nico's Chelsea Girl too but that was much later; Hectorine had been established by then. Back in the late aughts I had a bunch of friends who lived in the Mission near the Lone Palm and we would get drunk and jam every once in a while. We called it the Valencia Underground. It was madness — it would be like three of us on guitar and my friend Laura on piano, and then our friend Kyle would hear the commotion and come down and shake the tambourine. One of these musicians, Matthew, recorded everything and we listened to it together a few years ago when I was passing through his neck of the woods. It's completely unhinged. I think it must've been around then that I wrote my first song. I played a house show or two around then but I never recorded anything, and didn't dream of recording anything for a long time. About a decade, apparently. 

HS: What insight can you share about your latest album Arrow of Love and how and where was it recorded? What were some of the highlights putting it together? 

SG: This collection of songs was written between 2020 and 2023. I would say the majority of the songs were written in 2020, so it feels like a very pandemic heavy record. I was very isolated at the time, and I had been laid off from my food service job, and suddenly I had time to write. But in the beginning I was working on finishing Tears. I'd already written it so it was just a matter of fleshing out the arrangements and doing the actual recording, mixing, and mastering. I think I recorded Tears over the course of a few months. I've never been able to go into the studio for two weeks straight like some people do — it's always a few hours here, a few hours there, maybe once a week.  And then all along I was writing Arrow of Love but I didn't start recording it until long after, and it took an eternity. I worked with Geoff Saba of Itinerant Home with whom I'd never worked before but they came recommended by some friends. I didn't have any money and a good friend told me he would front it for me so I could start recording and later told me not to pay it back. This record would not exist without the generosity of my community. Of course I was working but it's just very, very expensive to make a record the way that I make records. Maybe I'll need to change that moving forward.  What Daniel Ek said about "creating content" — that it costs close to nothing — is just not true. Well, I suppose if you're a billionaire the cost would seem like nothing, relatively speaking. But it took a lot of money and it took a long time but every single time I went into the studio with Geoff was a highlight. They're just brilliant to work with on so many levels. It's funny because when we met for coffee to talk about the project I said something to the effect of, I don't think that this will be a synth-heavy album, and Geoff said oh that's too bad because I have a lot of great synths in the studio. And then ultimately it did turn into quite a synth-heavy album, but mostly just from asking the songs what they needed. I guess they wanted synths. Later we recorded the drums at Santo in West Oakland and that was a lot of fun. That's where we added the Juno, too.

HS: The ancient Sumerian warrior goddess Inanna's descent into the underworld is a powerful metaphor for personal transformation. How did the themes of death and rebirth resonate with your own journey, especially during such a tumultuous time in your life?

SG: At a certain point in your life it becomes clear that you can't run from your demons anymore; you can't busy your way out of your pain. And that's what happened to me in 2020. I died a particular type of death, perhaps more of a spiritual one than a capital D kind of death, and I needed to transform in order to be reborn. Staying the same, not diving into the darkness — diving into the wreck, as the poet Adrianne Rich would say — was simply not an option. I was forced to take a good hard look at my life, at all the choices that had gotten me there, and how I had participated in that journey, or didn't. Until March of 2020, when I was laid off, I'd always just felt like a passive participant in my life. As a child I got good grades, I did what I was told, got into a good college, and then I grew up and I worked so many jobs but could barely pay my bills. It took me an extraordinarily long time to get to the place where I could make music. And even then I always felt like I was struggling to keep my head above water in a vast and stormy sea, drifting from one dumb job to the next. And I didn't want to do that anymore. And of course it's not like I could stay unemployed forever but it did give me some time to think about, for the first time in my life, what I was doing and where I was going, and where I wanted to go, and to do some serious self-reflection. 

I could see the way that I was betrayed by my own partner during that time mirrored the way that Inanna was betrayed by Dumuzi — I suppose we humans are always trying to relate to one another, even to these characters from a text written 5,000 years ago — even down to the detail of Dumuzi's pastime of playing his reed pipe. But it was also through that experience — of descending into the bowels of hell, dying, learning of Dumuzi's betrayal, and then condemning him to take her place in the underworld ("His sheepfold was given to the wind") — that she becomes a warrior queen. I don't think I'm there yet, if I ever will be — whatever the modern equivalent of a warrior queen is. But I've made some progress. 

HS: You mention that you were inspired by Inanna’s myth through an online literature class with poet Ariana Reines. How did this class influence your writing process, and did it change the way you approached the album conceptually?

SG: This class most certainly influenced my writing process, it got me into poetry again — as a welcome alternative to doomscrolling, ingesting all the legitimate fear and also the fearmongering that was floating around in the ether — and it also provided community and structure at a time where I was forcibly disconnected from mine. Ariana is often offering the study of some ancient text or other. Invisible College these classes eventually were called — they started with Rilke's Duino Elegies and I missed that one but I read the elegies on my own. It was a time of a lot of death on both a personal and collective level and it felt apropos to be reading something so heavy, these mystical poems about angels, salvation, human existence. And, of course, Inanna’s journey of death and rebirth, serpents and betrayal and the seven gates of hell, which is very beautifully written, very poetic, it gets you thinking on this whole other level — like beyond yourself, beyond the earthly plane. But at the same time it's a very sensual text, too, and full of incantations. There's an incredibly long passage describing Inanna's lovemaking with her new husband, the shepherd-turned-king Dumuzi, in the language of farming. At one point she asks, "Who will plow my vulva?" And naturally he says that he will. After Inanna we studied Joe Brainard's I Remember, a 1970 experimental memoir. I think the last one she offered was Milton's Paradise Lost, which I still haven't read but it's on my list. It's sort of funny that I invoked Inanna in this context because the song it influenced most was a song called "Inanna," which was written and recorded in 2020 very simply with piano, vocals, and clarinet. I released it as a single on Bandcamp at some point that year but it's not out there anymore. I don't know if I'll ever properly release it. It tells the whole story of Inanna from start to finish, from the tree on the banks of the Euphrates to Inanna's death by the hand of her sister deep in the bowels of hell to her subsequent resurrection and the demons chasing down her shepherd lover Dumuzi when Inanna realizes that he has betrayed her, and it's very long. It doesn't feel like it fits into the rest of the oeuvre for some reason. 

Photos by Emily Dulla

HS: The album seems to mirror a journey of initiation, from solitude and loss to eventual re-emergence. Was there a particular moment during the recording process where you felt that transformation occur, both musically and emotionally? 

SG: Since I didn't start recording these songs until later, most of the transformation most certainly occurred prior to the recording process. But I had already started recording when I met someone and fell in love again — in the fall of 2021 — so I suppose that's the turning point — the shift from darkness to light, so to speak. The last two songs on the record are about that, and the pair reflects the duality of that experience. The hope and the terror. But the real transformation takes place much later, when the record is released. That's the moment the music is truly born, because to me music cannot exist in a vacuum. 

HS: In "Everybody Says," you described it as the saddest song you've written. Can you talk about the writing process for that track and how you managed to bring a sense of hope into the arrangement despite the dark subject matter?

SG: I've always loved the juxtaposition of minor key subject matter sung over a major key melody. But when I wrote the song I wasn't thinking about that. I just sat down at the piano and wrote it. When I got to the studio I knew I wanted to start off really stripped down, just vocals and synth, and slowly build into something bigger and, I suppose, brighter — and so we added the 12-string, piano, bass, drums, saxophone — and then that divine synth melody towards the end. I thought the song was finished, and then Geoff wrote that synth part and I knew it was really and truly finished. In retrospect it's a ridiculous thing to say, that you'll never love again, but when I wrote it I really meant it. And I'm glad it didn't end up being true. But even though it wasn't my fate, when I recorded the vocals for the song last year I couldn't get through it without crying. I could still viscerally connect with that feeling all too well. Sometimes it feels to me that songwriting is a kind of alchemy. I've been thinking a lot about alchemy these days, the ancient pursuit of turning base metals like lead into noble metals like gold. So often it's about turning some heavy feeling into a transcendent melody, some trauma into poetry. 

HS: The track "Take a Chance with Me" seems to be a leap into optimism. How did that track come together? 

SG: I unexpectedly fell in love and then I wrote this song. When I went into the studio Geoff immediately came up with that gorgeous electric piano melody and the bassline, and we kind of built the song around that. I wanted a really vibrant 12-string like the guitar on Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit," and then we added more synths and three-part vocal harmonies on the choruses, and additional little melodies and flourishes here and there. Geoff's idea to double the piano melody with the glockenspiel in the outro really elevates the song in my opinion. 

HS: You describe the song "Slip Through My Fingers" as being inspired by a breakup letter from Joni Mitchell to Graham Nash. What is it about that particular moment or sentiment that felt important to include in your own music?

SG: A friend told me the story once, that Joni Mitchell broke up with Graham Nash by way of a telegram from Crete that said, "If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers." When I wrote that song I had just entered a new relationship and I was, frankly, terrified. I think "Take A Chance With Me" showed unfettered hope — although I've gotten a lot of feedback that there's a lot of sadness in that song too, maybe a hint of desperation, it must have been imbued unconsciously because it felt, still feels very hopeful to me — and I wanted to show the other side of it. The fear. The fear of loss, of betrayal, of heartache. In the world of Inanna, will your lover mourn your death when you die? And for some reason that letter came to mind. The idea that something or someone that you cherish could slip through your fingers, and all the more so if you cling too tightly. And I wrote that whole song — melody, chords, and lyrics — in one sitting. 

HS: What's the story behind "Heart of Stone"? 

SG: "Heart of Stone" is about when you've built so many walls around yourself you can't even see beyond the fortress and no one can cross the moat. And that's ok for a while but eventually it gets old. But for the video we strayed from the original meaning of the song. Navigating late stage capitalism, making pennies for our music while Daniel Ek, a billionaire, and his ilk get richer, and now he's in bed with Helsing, an AI weapons company — I wanted to make an anti-capitalist statement and I came across an old German fairytale called Heart of Stone. It’s a bit of a Faustian bargain, as I suppose any tale of making a deal with the devil can be called nowadays. The fairytale features a poor young man who works at his father's charcoal business makes a deal with the evil forest imp in which he trades his human heart for a heart of stone in exchange for material success, the imp shows him a wall of hearts. They belong to all of the villagers who have traded their hearts for their wealth. I very much wanted to depict this wall of hearts in the video but due to time and resource limitations, we reduced it to a single heart that my character is hell bent on procuring from a pawn shop — a place that to me reeks of sadness and desperation. Pawning your wedding ring or a beloved instrument to pay the bills. And this corporate hack comes along with a fancy briefcase full of cash, which she is paranoid about losing, in search of some black market item. Enter the heart of stone. I wanted the exchange to feel extractive, the way that capitalism extracts from the earth as if it had boundless resources and corporations extract from workers as if they had endless time and energy. We wanted the cityscape, all the brutalist architecture in downtown San Francisco, to reflect the hardness of the heart of the capitalist/corporatist. And in the end, this character dies. I didn't want her to be able to get away with it. For money to trump everything. I wanted to show that the earth has wisdom that humans cannot know, that ultimately the businesswoman's heartlessness would lead to her demise, that she is so out of touch with the natural world that she's simply unequipped to survive in it. 

HS: You’ve mentioned that you intentionally stepped away from the folk influences of your debut album. What drew you to incorporate more electronic elements and instruments like the Korg Wavestation and electric piano on Arrow of Love?

SG: I have said that but upon reflection it seems I didn't totally step away from my folkie past — I mean, "These Hills" is undeniably a folk song, and there's 12-string guitar all over the record, Mellotron flutes, etc. The biggest difference regarding this record is that the other two records are based around my guitar. I would write a guitar part and then we'd build the arrangements around that — with a couple exceptions on Tears because I'd started learning to play keyboards, so some of those songs I wrote on keyboards. With this new record, "These Hills" is the only song to follow that formula. I wanted to see what would happen if we tried something else, what the arrangements would look like if they weren’t based around my guitar. Geoff has a real knack for pulling gorgeous melodies out of thin air. And we just used what they had in the studio. I love the sound of Rhodes, Dx7. The Juno we added at Santo when we did a couple sessions there. It was very much a journey of finding the right treatment for each song. Some songs revealed themselves very quickly while others did not. I think perhaps the song knows more than we do what it needs. You just have to keep adding fuel to the fire until it works. And sometimes there's a lucky break. We added the harpsichord on "Slip Through My Fingers" because Tika had just inherited one and told Geoff it could live in their studio. 

HS: What are some memories or thoughts looking back on your catalog and do you still relate to past releases like Tears and 2019's debut?

SG: Making that first record was an initiation in itself. I knew what I wanted to do but I didn't have the language for it, so I would always have to provide songs as references. Sometimes I'm chasing a feeling more than a particular arrangement or combination of instruments, and engineers often need something a bit more concrete. There was also something ineffable about the vocals I got really fixated on. It was frustrating sometimes — having to translate my vision into words. But it was easier with Tears, and even easier with Arrow of Love. I find it difficult to part with a record, to stop working on it, but there always comes a time when you can tell that you need to let go. Otherwise you'd just keep reworking it forever. And at a certain point it grows stale. And anything you add is unnecessary. Then you know it’s time to move on. The way I look at it, a record is a historical document of a moment in time. I would probably never make the same record twice, at least not in the same way. Kate Bush said, "Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state you're in at the time." I don't think if I were to make any of these records now that I would make them the same way. So yes, I still relate to those albums, but already with a lot of distance. 

HS: What do you enjoy most about living and playing music in the Bay Area? Also, who are some of your favorite groups there?

SG: Maybe I'm biased but my favorite Bay Area musician is my partner Joel Robinow of Once and Future Band. He's currently working on a solo record and it's going to blow everyone's minds. Hints of Harry Nilsson, Todd Rundgren, The Kinks — but jazzier. Really sophisticated stuff. I also love Magic Fig. It's this absolutely fantastic blend of prog and Broadcast, basically. Inna's other project is really great, too — Whitney's Playland. And there are the stalwarts of the SF scene I came up in. They're all great. April Magazine, Cindy, Mister Baby, Galore, Tony Jay, Hits, Famous Mammals — and newer projects like Now. We've been playing shows together for many years. 

HS: Any final words or thoughts you'd like to share with our readers? 

SG: Free Palestine!

Arrow of Love is out now on Take A Turn Records.