Rebecca Foon arrives with Black Butterflies, an album that marks a new moment in her career. In this chapter, the artist allows herself to experiment without limits, mixing electronic textures, embracing wider arrangements, and creating spaces where emotion can breathe. Foon explains that she now composes from a freer place, one where she can explore her feelings without worrying about fitting into a specific genre.
She shared that this album was born during a time of deep personal and global uncertainty, and it aims to reflect what it feels like to move through those emotions while trying to hold on to hope.
The black butterfly works as the central symbol. Something delicate yet resilient, moving forward even in the middle of chaos. Foon uses this image to talk about love, loss, climate anxiety, and the small moments that can feel huge when everything around us is shifting. The result is a project that invites listeners to pause, breathe, and let each song accompany the experiences we all go through in one way or another.
How would you describe the creative moment you’re experiencing now, and how does this new chapter redefine your music?
Right now, I feel like I’m entering a new chapter in my musical creative process, allowing myself to explore textures, electronics, orchestration, and space without worrying about boundaries between genres. It feels freeing in many ways, like a recalibration, a willingness to let music be both intimate and expansive, both fragile and architecturally precise. I am trying to give myself permission to float in a conscious and subconscious world musically, holding space for ambiguity and sitting in complex emotions like climate grief and uncertainty while still reaching for light and hope. The emotional stakes in today’s world feel higher, and so does the desire to craft a sonic world that can hold them.
Black Butterflies is presented as your most expansive and dream-pop-influenced work. How would you define it conceptually? What did you want to convey or express with it?
Conceptually, Black Butterflies is a meditation on transformation in a moment of deep global and personal instability. The idea of a black butterfly emerged as a symbol of delicate endurance, something beautiful, mysterious, spiritual, and shaped by forces perhaps larger than itself. I wanted to explore sonically the space where tenderness meets uncertainty and how love persists even when the world feels deeply unstable. How grief can coexist with beauty, how the smallest emotional moments can feel cinematic when everything around us is shifting. The dream-pop elements allowed me to create a sense of suspension in time, an atmosphere where feelings don’t need to resolve immediately.
In Black Butterflies, you talk about love, loss, resilience, and climate anxiety. What challenges did you face in turning these very personal and universal themes into musical pieces?
The biggest challenge was allowing space for the diversity of themes to appear without trying to soften or control too much. Climate anxiety is such a vast landscape, it can easily be overwhelming. I had to find ways to translate that immensity into something human-sized: the sound of a single breath, a sparse cello line, etc. Another challenge was balancing personal experience and universality. I wanted the music to feel specific enough to touch on deeply personal moments in my life but spacious enough that listeners could place themselves inside it.
You’ve said that the album is a meditation on “quiet resilience.” How do you understand that concept in your current life, and how is it reflected on the record?
By quiet resilience, I am referring to the ability to keep showing up with softness in a world that often demands hardness. On the record, that resilience appears in restraint like long, fragile notes or the minimalist beats that pulse like a heartbeat. In my life right now, I also see quiet resilience as listening deeply, leaving space, and letting beauty be a form of resistance.
At the heart of the album is your collaboration with Patrick Watson on the song If I Could Only See the Distant Sky. What’s the story behind the song, and what does this track mean to you?
The song emerged completely organically. I was recording at my barn studio in the Laurentians, and Patrick and his son came to visit. He spontaneously jumped in on that song and started improvising lyrics and melodies that completely added a new beautiful dimension to the song. He has an intuitive melodic superpower, and I feel this all over the record, which is rooted in elegant emotional wings of sorts. For me, this track is the emotional spine of the album and my favorite song on the album as well.
The video was filmed on 16mm on Governors Island and has a raw, contemplative aesthetic. What were you trying to convey visually, and how does the video relate to the song’s central emotion?
Shooting on 16mm created a visual landscape that felt textured, imperfect, and alive. Governors Island offered a natural beauty suspended between nature, human intervention, and decay, mirroring the song’s tension. The video captures the feeling of wandering through an internal landscape: moments of stillness, isolation, and longing, contrasted with glimpses of openness, hope, and possibility.
Musically, you blend cello, piano, minimalist beats, and cinematic arrangements, along with a very particular list of collaborators. What was it like to construct that musical fabric, and how important was it to work with your sister, Aliayta, on violins?
Building this musical fabric felt like weaving between a very intimate sound and large orchestral arrangements. Working with my sister, Aliayta, is always deeply meaningful for me, as she understands my musical instincts in a way that feels almost telepathic. It honestly blows my mind every time we play together. Her violin lines feel like an extension of my own thought process; they are so familiar in a way I don’t ever really understand. I am so grateful for this connection.
Your work has always had a social and spiritual dimension. How does this album continue that inner and outer exploration?
I would say Black Butterflies continues this exploration by focusing on the emotional landscapes that shape how we move through crisis and love. Spiritually, you could say it is about being present; staying awake to hope and solutions while also being aware and holding compassion for our collective struggles and pain that we are going through as a planet.
You’ll soon be presenting Black Butterflies at National Sawdust in New York. What can the audience expect from this concert?
Absolutely, it will be a beautiful evening that bridges the worlds of contemporary chamber music and ambient sounds, blending strings, voice, and minimalist electronics and beats. The evening will begin with two incredible solo performances, my sister Aliayta Foon-Dancoes performing a solo piece for violin with breathtakingly beautiful lighting sculptures designed by Kai, and violist Nathan Schram, celebrated for his work with the GRAMMY-winning Attacca Quartet and his incredible solo projects.
I will then be performing alongside Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, Nathan Schram, and Mishka Stein (bassist for Patrick Watson) to create a live experience that fuses classical structure with dream-pop ambient resonance to perform my new album, Black Butterflies.
CONNECT WITH REBECCA FOON
WOFFICIAL| INSTA | FACEBOOK | YOUTUBE
SEO Description: