For MPR Music, you're connected to all songs considered. I'm Bob Boylin with the most beautiful music I've heard in 2022, and it's by Flores.

Flores began as a solo project of Emily Sprig, but now on this new self-titled album, it's fully abandoned.

The members Emily Sprig, Johnny Baker, Rick Spittaro, and Felix Walworth recorded this new music on a screened-in porch with the birds singing along.

The 19 tracks on this album include Pensive Electronic and Acoustic Interludes that make for a peaceful and thoughtful listen.

Here's Emily Sprig to introduce us to the opening track, Red Bird Part 2 Morning.

Red Bird Part 2 is sort of like a prelude track on the album Flores. It's a gentle and familiar guide into the beginning of the 58-minute journey of the full album.

Lairically, it's about holding the dualities of life and death, memory, and waking life, experiencing sadness, but having so much to be thankful for.

It's a collage of reflections and some kind of a prayer honoring the importance of our interconnectivity to everything.

We recorded this track on a screened-in porch on a hot day in June. We wanted the instrumentation to be minimal using analog synthesizers and guitars with the vocals up front and almost spoken word like the nature sounds, the birds, the wind.

It was all alive with us on the porch as we recorded.

So when you listen to the song, you can feel the sense of being in that space with us, embracing vulnerability, and capturing those few minutes of life, just how they happened.

There's a winter morning you didn't know me yet, it probably was snowing. I wonder what was said of the days quickly going to a will come ahead.

I don't know if I can ever love someone like that.

But I can only think about that day and what it meant when the doctor came out and said, you have a daughter now.

No.

How does it seem to rearrange all the images in my mind believe that it happened to me like I was lost but it happened all the same.

And I can hear you singing still waking in the morning so we're in calm. Where's it gone now, where's it gone?

I've seen photos of the living room, he didn't have a lot in the house, needed some work done so you dated all yourself or a few in a family, a place we could call.

So comes another year now did you ever even think we both be back here looking out at this beautiful place, seeing nothing but the glow of memory and the world in our vision where she would be gone.

So goes I come home and I go home.

How can it be that the days go on and the red bird sings it's a red bird song it happened to us in it's happened before it happens all the same.

I can hear you singing still waking in the morning so we're in calm.

...