The Fossil Record hopes to give some permanence to life’s more ephemeral moments

Rachel Scott started work on the songs that would become the Fossil Record’s debut album, Together We’re a Modern Person, seven years ago, with the initial writing taking place in the six months of maternity leave that followed the birth of her first son.

At the time, Scott was living in Boston, and many of her earliest songs wrestled with the idea of what might be subsumed in the shift to parenthood. “There was a lot of joy,” said Scott, who will celebrate the album release in concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Saturday, July 20, joined by Mukiss, Confusions and Fellow Hollow. “But there was also this sense of loss with your old self and your old life. And I remember feeling very fundamentally rearranged, and I ended up using music to work through some of that.”

From the onset, Scott said the Fossil Record has existed largely in “stolen moments,” with early writing and recording done during infant nap times and in those odd, increasingly rare moments she could steal away to hash out a verse, layer synthesizers in a recording program or record a snippet of vocals while locked in the bathroom. 

When the musician’s initial maternity leave ended, she shelved the project and returned to work, planning to pick back up when she had a second child with an intention to finish the album in the same manner in which it started. Unfortunately, when Scott gave birth to a second son on March 25, 2020 – just 10 days after Covid sent the country into a prolonged lockdown – the environment proved less than conducive to doing anything creative. “We didn’t have childcare and it was like, okay, this will be a dream deferred, because there’s no way I’m doing any of this now,” she said.

But beginning in the early spring of 2022, Scott began to feel as though she could come up for air, and she again gravitated toward her electric guitar with designs on singing songs that weren’t lullabies or Raffi tunes. The tracks that arrived in this second burst followed a similar musical template – Fossil Record songs tend to be dense and lush, layered with synthesizers that lend the proceedings a gauzy, almost dreamlike feel – but offered a different sense of perspective.

“A lot of the songs I had written in the sort of ‘before times’ were about that early experience of crossing the threshold into parenthood. There’s a song about processing miscarriage, and it was sort of what I was living at the time,” Scott said. “And I think the ones that are sort of from the ‘after period,’ I was at a different point in the journey of parenting and co-parenting. My partner and I, we’ve been together for 22 years, and there’s a bit of that retrospective and tribute to what that’s been as we’ve moved through these different phases of life together.”

This idea crystallizes in the album-closing “Co-Machine,” a largely instrumental track that eschews vocals in favor of slice-of-life “field recordings” captured in the course of day-to-day life, including snippets recorded during Columbus Recreation and Parks tee ball games in which Scott’s children played. “It really felt like a nice little capstone to a lot of the journey that had been documented,” said Scott, who named the project the Fossil Record in part to reflect the idea that these temporary moments can be preserved in the music. “It’s a way of taking these experiences and inflection points and making an imprint of them, a bit of a fossil that can stick over time.”

Though developed as an insular bedroom project, Scott credits a number of collaborations with helping to breathe further life into the songs. Following the second round of recording in 2022, Scott connected with Ben Turner of Confusions, who ended up playing drums on the album, adding heft and swing to tracks such as “The Longest Day.” And when the musicians set out to record, Scott connected with Caeleigh Featherstone (Mukiss), who helmed sessions at Secret Studio and helped to give the resulting songs a sense of dimension that practically allows listeners to step inside and be enveloped by them.

While Fossil Record songs can deal with weighty subjects, the music is consistently shot through with glimmering hope – a trait Scott described as endemic to her personality, and one further burnished by the bonds built in more recent years.

“We moved back here to Columbus shortly before the pandemic, and any development of social connections was put on hold for like two years,” said Scott, who worked remotely, further limiting any ability to expand on her social circles. “Then at some point I started to make those connections with Ben and Caeleigh, but also other folks through them. … And then I started to realize this was how I was going to build community here. And this was how I was going to find my people in this city, in this chapter of my life. And I think along with that, there’s been a real buoyancy that has come through in some of the later songs I’ve written. … It’s like you can take a breath and really feel some of that optimism.”