| Americana, Indie Folk |
Abby Posner – Rest & Rise: Songs from the Place Where a Heart Breaks and Begins Again
Rest & Rise is a beautiful album, sometimes startlingly so. But its beauty does not come from pretending that life is beautiful all the time. It comes from looking directly at the moments when life falls apart: from standing in the silence left by someone who is gone, from discovering that places, objects and routines that once made us feel safe can suddenly become haunted by memory, and from understanding that the world has not stopped simply because your world has. And then, somehow, from continuing.
That is the journey of Rest & Rise. It is not a simple journey from sadness to happiness, but one from stillness to movement, from exhaustion to breath, and from the moment when all you can do is rest to the moment when, perhaps trembling a little, you discover that you can rise. Abby Posner has turned that journey into an album of extraordinary emotional honesty.
The album is divided into two halves: Rest and Rise. It is a simple idea, almost deceptively so, but inside that simplicity lies the entire emotional architecture of the record.
The six songs of Rest (“I’m Doing Fine,” “Until We Heal,” “Hold It In,” “Soon I’ll Move On,” “Lemon Soap” and “Shut It Off”) occupy the difficult territory of emotional suspension: grief, fatigue, memory, uncertainty and the painful attempt to understand what remains after a relationship or a familiar life has changed.
Then comes Rise, with “The Rising”, “The Moon Is Made of Green Cheese”, “Losing Me”, “Failures On The Wall” and, finally, “Die Alone”. But Posner is too emotionally honest to suggest that Rise means everything is suddenly fine. Healing does not work like that. The person who rises is still carrying the person who fell, and wounds do not disappear simply because we have learned how to walk again. That is what makes the structure of Rest & Rise so powerful. The album does not travel in a straight line. It breathes, stops, hesitates and remembers before finding the strength to move again.
The first song is called “I’m Doing Fine”. Perhaps there are no three words more capable of hiding pain. We say them to friends, to strangers, to people we do not want to worry, and sometimes, or most of the times, even to ourselves. Occasionally they are true. But sometimes they become the sentence we build between ourselves and a world we are not ready to explain.
“I’m Doing Fine” opens Rest & Rise with the feeling of someone watching life continue from a place of emotional stillness. Posner’s observations of the world around her become reminders that other people continue to move, grow, love and change even while she remains caught inside her own experience of loss. It is one of the most devastating experiences after heartbreak. The flowers still bloom, people still laugh, coffee shops still open, and somewhere someone falls in love for the first time. Meanwhile, you wonder how the world can continue to behave so normally when something inside you has collapsed.
The song was shaped by travel through South Carolina, creating physical distance from California and from memories that had become difficult to escape. But geography is rarely strong enough to defeat memory. You can leave a city, a house or a room, but some heavy things travel with you. What makes “I’m Doing Fine” such a remarkable opening is that its music does not simply sit inside sadness. It moves through changing textures and perspectives, almost as though the song itself is trying to find a way forward. The body keeps travelling, and the music keeps travelling too, even when the heart has not yet caught up.
There is something almost miraculous about the independence behind Rest & Rise. Abby Posner produced, engineered and mixed the album and performed nearly all of its instrumental parts herself. Acoustic instruments form the foundations of songs that then expand into richer and sometimes unexpected sonic environments. The record also features contributions from Ryan Cassata and Freddy Angelico.
But describing this merely as a display of multi-instrumental talent would miss the point. Abby does not collect instruments like trophies; she uses them like colours, memories and different voices inside the same dream. A guitar can create intimacy, and an unexpected texture can suddenly open a new window inside a song. The arrangements never feel like decoration. They feel emotional, telling us something even when no words are being sung. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Rest & Rise feels so complete. Posner is not simply writing songs, she is building the rooms in which these songs live, deciding where the light enters, where the shadows remain and where silence should be allowed to stay.
The first half of the album understands something our culture is often reluctant to admit: sometimes you cannot rise immediately. Sometimes you are really tired, and sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is survive the day. The titles themselves tell a story. “Until We Heal” suggests that healing is somewhere ahead, visible but still distant. “Hold It In” evokes the instinct to contain what feels too large. “Soon I’ll Move On” sounds like the fragile promise we make to ourselves when we desperately want to believe the future will eventually become lighter. “Shut It Off” expresses the impossible wish to find a switch for memory.
And then there is “Lemon Soap”, a title that immediately suggests something intimate and sensory, the kind of detail that can suddenly carry the entire weight of a lost world. This is where Posner is particularly strong as a songwriter. She understands that grief is rarely made from grand statements. It lives in details: a smell, a street, a room, a phrase, an object you cannot throw away or a song you can no longer hear in the same way. The smallest things become archives, and suddenly you discover that memory is everywhere.
Someone once described Abby Posner as “the female Elliott Smith who can shred on the guitar and play every instrument under the sun.”
It is a striking comparison and, in some ways, a genuinely interesting one. But comparisons can become prisons if we take them too literally. Abby Posner is not Elliott Smith, and she does not need to be. What makes the comparison meaningful is something deeper than surface sound. Like Elliott, Abby understands that intimacy does not have to mean simplicity. A song can whisper and still contain an entire universe. Personal pain can become intricate musical architecture, and a voice can sound exposed while the arrangement surrounding it remains full of imagination, detail and unexpected movement.
There is a shared sense that music can be both fragile and carefully constructed, and that vulnerability and musical intelligence are not opposites. But biography is where the comparison should become more cautious. Elliott Smith’s life ended tragically and far too soon. Rest & Rise comes from pain too, but it is ultimately a record about something else: remaining. It asks what happens after the worst moment has happened and you are still here. What happens when there is no dramatic conclusion, only another morning, another breath, another road and another song. Perhaps this is where Abby Posner’s journey moves away from the shadow suggested by the comparison. Rest & Rise does not romanticise suffering. It asks what comes after it.
We all know that there is no divine light that announces healing and no voice from the sky saying that everything is better now. Usually, we notice the change later. We realise that we went somewhere without thinking about the past every second, we realise that a song no longer hurts quite as much, or that the future, which once seemed impossible to imagine, has quietly returned.
That is what Rise feels like: not uncomplicated triumph, but “return”, the return of movement, curiosity and possibility. “The Rising” does not erase the songs that came before it. It carries them, and that is essential. The album would be less convincing if its second half simply replaced darkness with brilliant light. Instead, the light arrives carrying shadows with it. That is closer to how real recovery works. You do not necessarily become the person you were before. You become someone else, someone who knows something now that you did not know before.
The title “Failures On The Wall” is a very powerful image for the album. We often imagine failure as something we should hide, something to remove from the photograph or erase from the story. But our failures are part of the architecture of who we become and perhaps the wall would look strange without them. Ryan Cassata contributes to this part of the album’s journey, bringing another voice into a record otherwise shaped so profoundly by Abby’s individual artistic vision. There is something beautiful about that reminder: even the most solitary journeys are not entirely solitary. People appear, listen, sing with us and leave their marks. We are never made entirely alone.
And there is the final song: “Die Alone”. What a title with which to close an album about heartbreak, recovery and renewal. Posner could have chosen reassurance. She could have ended with a sunrise, with certainty, or with the promise that love always returns. Instead, she leaves us with one of the oldest fears we carry as human beings: the fear of being alone, and the knowledge that, after everything, we may still have to face life, and death, as individuals. And this is precisely why the ending is so powerful. Rest & Rise has never been an album interested in lying to us. Healing does not remove every fear, and growth does not answer every question. You can rise and still be afraid. You can become stronger and still feel alone. You can move forward and still look behind you. This album’s final question remains in the air, and perhaps that is where it belongs. Some questions should not be closed. They should be carried.
The emotional directness of Rest & Rise is supported by an unusually broad musical life. Abby Posner began playing music as a child and developed into a multi-instrumentalist and composer, studying at the California Institute of the Arts before building a career across songwriting, performance, production and composition. Her work has reached film and television audiences through placements on major platforms, while her career has also included performances at important festivals and events. But none of those achievements explain Rest & Rise on their own. Experience gives an artist tools, pain gives them something to say, and imagination decides what to do with both. On this album, Abby Posner brings those elements together: the songwriter, the musician and the survivor.
The great strength of Rest & Rise is that it does not try to make pain beautiful by pretending that pain is pleasant. It is not. Heartbreak can be repetitive, grief can be boring, loneliness can be ugly and healing can be painfully slow. Sometimes there is nothing poetic about suffering while you are inside it. But art can look back at those experiences and find a shape, a rhythm, a melody, a place where someone else might recognise themselves. Abby has expressed the hope that listeners will find something of their own experiences in these songs and feel less alone. That may be the quiet miracle of an album like this. One person’s private collapse becomes another person’s companion. Someone listens in the dark and thinks: “Yes. I know that feeling”. And suddenly the darkness is not quite as empty.
Rest & Rise is a deeply moving, beautifully constructed and emotionally fearless album. Its background is painful, its questions are real and its journey is not easy. But the record never becomes trapped inside its own sadness. Abby Posner allows herself to rest, to be confused, to remember, to hurt, to be angry, to be strange, to imagine, and then, to rise. Everything here serves the emotional journey. That is why the Elliott Smith comparison, while imperfect, can still be useful. Both artists understand that the most intimate music can contain enormous complexity, that vulnerability can be sophisticated, and that songs which seem small at first can reveal unexpected rooms behind their walls. But Rest & Rise ultimately belongs entirely to Abby Posner. It is her voice, her journey, her scars and her instruments, it is her way of finding beauty without pretending that everything is beautiful.
This is an album about what happens when life forces you to stop, and what happens when, one day, you discover that you are moving again. Not necessarily running or flying, simply moving, one step after another, until the stillness behind you becomes something you can remember rather than somewhere you still live. Rest, and when you can, rise.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 4th, 2026
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Tracklisting
(as mentioned on the back cover of the CD – but all songs are on one CD):
Rest (side A)
I’m Doing Fine
Until We Heal
Hold It In
Soon I’ll Move On
Lemon Soap
Shut It Off
Rise (side B)
The Rising
The Moon Is Maade of Green Cheese
Losing Me
Failures On The Wall (featuring Ryan Cassata)
Die Alone
Produced, performed and instruments played by Abby Posner.
Vocals/co-writing by Ryan Cassata on Failures On The Wall
Special guest: Freddy Angelico, pedal steel on I’m Doing Fine