Mark Herz: This is GBH’s Morning Edition. Local singer-songwriter and Berkeley alum Naomi Westwater has a new album out this month. It’s called "Cycle and Change." The folk and jazz record is inspired by the Wheel of the Year — that’s a calendar with eight sun holidays, including the spring and fall equinox. And the songs on the album are tied to each one of those holidays. Naomi stopped by the GBH studios in Brighton with guitar in hand to talk about the project.

Westwater singing, pre-recorded: Holy basil in the moonlight / Who are you to tell me I’m not right?

Naomi Westwater: This album is permission for me to kind of combine my spirituality and my creativity. I think for a long time I felt like they had to be separate, and I actually feel as I’ve allowed myself to bring my spirituality into my creativity, it’s allowed my creativity to deepen and I can go deeper and kind of feel like I’m now tapped into this endless well of creativity.

Westwater singing, pre-recorded: Lavender coming up from the ground / Signs of spring are out, you know we should all be out

Westwater: The album starts in spring and goes into summer, fall, and then ends in winter. And so, you know, my hope is that the songs stand alone on their own and you enjoy them on their own, but it is meant to be an old school record where you sit down and you listen to it from start to finish.

Herz: Well, speaking of old school, I want to hear about your influences. And I will say that when I listen to you, you’re a singer-songwriter, so there’s two things to talk about here. There’s two kinds of voices: there’s the literal voice, and then there’s the voice of you as a songwriter. And when I listened to your actual voice, I’m hearing things like maybe some Nora Jones–reminiscent, sort of jazz-inflected timbres. And other times it ranges into different places. Maybe some Joni Mitchell influence in there. So how did you find your voice, both literally as a singer and then as a songwriter? Tell us about that journey.

Westwater: I think it was allowing myself to not sound like anybody else. And I was jazz trained, but I wanted to do more folk-rock music and allowing myself to still bring in that jazz timbre, that vibrato, but in a singer-songwriter context and saying yes to both instead of having to restrict myself. I’m very influenced by the '60s, '70s singer-songwriters like Laura Nero and Joni Mitchell. I think another huge influence is poetry. I’m very obsessed with Mary Oliver and her also kind of appreciation and obsession of nature, and I really allowed that to influence me and I’ve spent a lot of time with her work over the last few years as well.

Herz: So let’s talk about the title song of this new album, "Cycle and Change." It’s a really interesting song because it’s got a lot of build, and it goes to a place that — well, I’ll let you describe — but I hear the ecstatic in this.

Westwater: Yeah, so I wrote that song spring of 2020 when we were all locked down in our apartments, and my grandmother had just died. And I was kind of reflecting on how, you know, the way it works in New England is kind of you don’t see anybody for all of winter and then spring happens and you’re out and about and you have a social life again. But with 2020 we were still in lockdown. And it was this realization that everything is cycle and change, which is that we don’t have control. There are things outside of our control that change our lives and we change, but also spring comes every year and that’s the cycle of it. And can we hold both of those two concepts to be true? That there’s always going to be change, but there’s also always going to be cycles?

Westwater singing, pre-recorded: Everything is cycle and change / Everything is cycle and change / Everything is cycle and change / Everything is cycle and change

Herz: Local musician Naomi Westwater, thank you for joining us. Her new album Cycle and Change out this month -- and would you like to play us out?

Westwater: Yes, this is my song off of the record, called ‘Eat My Cake.’

Herz: This is GBH.

Westwater singing: I wanna a friend who turns into a lover / And I wanna wake up sober next to her.

Local musician Naomi Westwater is out with a new album this month, titled “Cycle and Change.”

The folk and jazz record is inspired by the Wheel of the Year, which features eight sun holidays, including the equinoxes and solstices.

Westwater visited the GBH Studio in Brighton with a guitar in hand to share more about the process of writing the album, their musical inspirations and more.

“This album is permission for me to kind of combine my spirituality and my creativity,” they said. “I think for a long time I felt like they had to be separate and I actually feel as I’ve allowed myself to bring my spirituality into my creativity. … I’m now tapped into this endless well of creativity.”

“Cycle and Change” is a concept record, where the songs are written in communication with each other as part of a collective narrative or theme. Westwater likened the structure to chapters of a novel as opposed to a collection of short stories.

“The order you listen to the record is important,” she said. “The flow of the record is important.”

The album begins in spring, and goes into summer, fall and then concludes in winter.

“And so my hope is that the songs stand alone on their own and you enjoy them on their own,” she said. “But it is meant to be an old school record where you sit down and you listen to it from start to finish.”

Westwater cited poetry as a key influence for the record, highlighting American poet Mary Oliver’s appreciation of nature. They also credited songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s, including Laura Nero and Joni Mitchell, as some of their musical influences.

“I think it was [about] allowing myself to not sound like anybody else,” they said. “I was jazz trained, but I wanted to do more folk-rock music and allow myself to still bring in that jazz timbre, that vibrato, but in a singer-songwriter context.”

Westwater began working on the album in 2020. She wrote the titular song “Cycle and Change” that spring, following the passing of her late grandmother.

“I was kind of reflecting on the way it works in New England: You don’t see anybody for all of winter, and then spring happens, and you’re out and about and you have a social life again,” she said. “But with 2020, we were all still in lockdown. And it was this realization that everything is cycle and change — which is that we don’t have control. There are things outside of our control that change our lives and we change, but also spring comes every year and that’s the cycle of it.”

Westwater’s website notes that the songs for “Cycle and Change” were recorded in an old church in West Springfield, as a means to “merge their spirituality with their music and fully embrace their identity as both a songwriter and a witch.”

“I knew that so many amazing studios in the Boston area are in basements, and I was like, ‘this is a spiritual record and I need to be able to feel the spiritual aspect when we actually record it,’” she said. “And so [recording in] a gorgeous 1800s church just felt really right to have a spiritual record in a spiritual place.”