Today is a great day to share the latest single and music video from the ultra-talented NYC-based harpist/vocalist, Stephanie Babirak, called “Hey Cain.” Stephanie shared:
This song borrows the story of Cain and Abel to explore the difficulty of accepting a very specific kind of loss. It’s about the grief, sense of betrayal, and disbelief that comes from letting go of someone who is okay with losing you, and how strange it is to mourn someone who’s still alive…someone you still love very much. I was thinking a lot about the First Corinthians verse ‘Love is patient, love is kind’ when I wrote this song, and about how untrue that can be—love can be incredibly painful even when it’s real.
Stephanie Babirak’s talent is on full display on the vibrant lead single from her sophomore album, Rotten Fruit, that will be released on all streaming services on June 12th.
With Rotten Fruit, you place the harp at the center of a contemporary folk-pop sound—how did the harp first come into your life, and how did you approach re-imagining the instrument outside of its traditional classical setting?
My mom suggested the harp to me when I was 13, and I fell in love with it right away. I loved the sound immediately, and it’s also just really fun to play. I had a very classical teacher and pretty traditional training, but growing up I was mostly listening to indie rock, so there was always this disconnect between the instrument I loved and the music I was actually listening to. That became even more obvious when I was studying classical harp in college and then leaving the practice room to go listen to Modest Mouse rather than Mozart. I started experimenting with how to make a place for the harp in that world, which at the time was not especially encouraged. I actually got in trouble with my harp teacher for playing with rock bands, but I didn’t stop. At a certain point it just felt more honest to bring the instrument I loved into the music I actually loved, rather than keep those two parts of my life separate.
Rotten Fruit begins with the lead single “Hey Cain,” which draws from the story of Cain and Abel—how did that narrative become a framework for the album?
I grew up very Christian, so Bible stories are pretty deeply embedded in how I understand the world, whether I want them to be or not. Using something like Cain and Abel felt natural because it’s such a simple, ancient story about jealousy and betrayal that still maps easily onto modern relationships. Part of writing “Hey Cain” was using that language in a different way. Not necessarily rejecting it, but reclaiming it a little and applying it to my own experiences. It let me talk about something personal without having to invent a whole new framework for it. Those stories don’t really leave you, so I figured I might as well use them.
The album grapples with themes of inherited belief systems, guilt, and the idea of what it means to be “bad”—at what point did those concepts begin to take shape as a cohesive thread across the record?
When I first started writing the songs, I don’t think I fully understood what they were about yet. It only became clear after the fact that I was circling this idea of being inherently “bad,” and once I saw it, I couldn’t really unsee it. I think part of that also comes from growing up queer in a moral framework where that isn’t exactly encouraged. That sense of wrongness can go pretty deep, even if you no longer consciously believe it. The album title Rotten Fruit came from thinking about the verse that a good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit, and using that as a new measure-if something is producing something good, can it actually be bad?