Last spring right around this time, I got an email from Thor Harris with the subject line: “Fallen Mormons from Provo, Utah.” His succinct message about this group was, “These guys would be a great addition to the JNR roster. Yours in Satan’s Anus, Thor.”

I clicked on the video link to Little Moon’s Tiny Desk Concert and wrote Thor back.

This is actually good, I told him. How do you know Little Moon?

I don’t, he replied. "I don't know them. I just heard it and thought it would be good for JNR."

To contextualize how unusual this exchange was, I have to review JNR’s demos policy which states:

We will only listen to your demo if it is introduced to us by one of our artists.

This is an experientially informed policy that saves us hundreds of hours a year better spent listening to demos and versions of albums that JNR is actually going to release. It’s no shade on the quality of your work if we don’t listen to your demo: It just means we haven't been properly inroduced by one of our artists with whom you already have an existing relationship or acquaintance. That's how we invite new acts into the family. But here is a case—the first and only case—where the impresario (Thor, in this case)—bypassed the whole ‘having an existing relationship’ phase of the formula. Thor didn’t need to meet Little Moon to know that they were perfect. He knew that they were going to get along with us. And he was right.

Having listened to the sample Thor sent, I realized that Little Moon would be playing a show in Chicago a few days later and booked a trip to go see them. Thus, having already released some four hundred records at the helm of JNR, I found myself dispatched on the one and only A&R mission of my career that resembled—in its opening stages—the traditional and now nostalgic model of artist acquisition by record labels in the twentieth century. I didn’t know these people yet. I didn’t know anybody who knew them. There were other fish in the water looking to sign them.

The show was incredible and resists easy narrative summary but a particular snippet of stage banter stands out in my mind as possibly relatable. “I have to be honest with you,” Emma told the sold-out crowd at the packed show that they were headlining. “I’ve been struggling with diarrhea for the past three weeks on this tour.” 

The audience lost it. Unselfconscious public honesty of this sort is rare enough in any context--but even more rare out of the mouths of 'angelic' female vocalists onstage in front of large crowds. Here is one I will have no trouble believing in, whatever happens. By the time the curtains closed on their set, I was genuinely convinced that I should sign them.

Negotiations took a little while because Little Moon had to be wooed to accept an artistic partnership instead of a massive advance up front.  This is the debt-forward style of label relations, similar to going to an expensive college on the assumption that the job of your dreams will automatically materialize the moment the ink is dry on your diploma. Little Moon chose the path of greater wisdom.

They wrote their first album while dealing with a death in the family and in a crisis of faith. It is unusual and beautiful collection of songs. When asked about the work, Emma said in an interview: “Mormonism believes in life after death, resurrection and eternal families.”

She continues: “There is beauty and comfort in our former beliefs of certainty, light and life; we honor and respect such teachings. But we also find deep beauty in uncertainty, darkness, chaos and death. Perhaps it’s all one and the same.”

As far as we’re concerned at this point, that sounds like the gospel truth. Except that, in this case, we believe it. 

Emma’s voice is something very special. She’s been compared to Joanna Newsom. But that’s not fair: She’s better than Joanna Newsom. Her singing has some novel qualities—that’s true. But it is more universal in its invitation. Bigger. More enveloping in its acoustical embrace.

These songs have certain qualities in common with the old hymns with this important difference: We believe her. We think that you will too.

POSTSCRIPT 

Perhaps our connection with Little Moon was actually an astrologically fated event? The day that ink was dry on the contract, as Emma shared with us recently by text message, corresponded to the rise of this 2024's snow moon--the littlest full moon of the year.