Music Review | 'The Healing' 

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On March 4, singer-songwriter Sarah De Vallière released “The Healing,” a folky story-song with an unlikely visual source of inspiration. The single precedes a full-length concept album of the same name, due in June.

Lyrically, the song narrates the journey of a character in a physically remote place that happens to hit too close to home psychologically. The protagonist navigates what De Vallière describes in the song as “the space between hurting and healing,” but the stakes are not abstract or hypothetical.

The song’s hero is an existing character — Dr. Helen Sterling, the creation of graphic novelist and musician Dave Chisholm from his four-part sci-fi serial “Canopus.” The scientist crash-lands on a planet more than 300 light years away from Earth, accompanied only by the robot-like Arther, who calls her “mom.”

“This was me trying to understand myself: How do I escape this cycle in my head of hanging onto this poison of resentment?” Chisholm said in an interview with CITY from 2020.

Lyrics from “The Healing” depict the struggle as something inescapable and inevitable: You cannot run from these memories, more than just a feeling. This emotional earnestness and instability are mirrored musically by harmonic ambiguity — enhanced by the use of the mixolydian mode — and a mid-tempo locomotion drawing from clave rhythms typically found in salsa and Afro-Cuban jazz. Meanwhile, sweeping strings provided by members of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra imbue the music with a cinematic scope.

Sarah De Vallière and her band play an album preview show for “The Healing” at Lovin’ Cup on Saturday, April 27. Doors open at 6 p.m., and the music starts at 7 p.m. $10. lovingcup.com.

Daniel J. Kushner is an arts writer at CITY. He can be reached at [email protected].