An introduction to First Landing by Steve Salett by Craig Finn

I’ve known Steve Salett long enough that I don’t remember our first meeting. I do know that we met in Minneapolis, where he had a post college band called Deformo that I really dug. He sang better and more musically than the singers of other local bands. Sometimes he’d switch from a low baritone to a bratty higher register in the same song- the affect being like a conversation between two different characters. Our bands played a few shows together. One year Deformo was named “Best Band in the Twin Cities” by mainstay local weekly City Pages. Their song “Mr. Saturday Night” was a Minnesota college radio hit.

Despite the band’s local popularity, Steve and his future wife Estella left the Twin Cities for NYC in 1998. They married in NYC and eventually became parents, with two kids born two years apart in the mid 2000s.

I moved to Brooklyn in 2000 and ran into Steve sporadically. He had started a new band called The King of France. He also started building and renting out rehearsal spaces in a building in Dumbo. In 2007, he opened Saltlands Studio in the basement. The spaces and studio put Steve at the center of a vibrant music community in Brooklyn- clients included Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, Josh Ritter, Dawn Landes, Josh Kaufman, Thomas Bartlett, and many more.

In early 2011, he emailed me to tell me about the record he’d been working on, called The Poison Tree. He was very proud of it. It was a musical move forward, and felt more natural to him than being a part of a band. The record came out in early 2011 and garnered strong notices from music and culture publications.

Around the time of the release show for the album, Estella was told that she had cancer. It spread quickly. Only months later, at the end of 2011, she lost her battle with the disease. Steve was now a widower and a single father of two young children, aged 4 and 6. As the family tried to navigate their new life without Estella, making music was put aside for a bit.

One night after a show in NYC in 2014, Steve and I huddled at the side of the bar and caught up a bit. It was my first time seeing him after Estella passed, and I tried to express condolences. He talked openly about grief, about trying to move forward. He said he was starting to write and play a little bit.

So it is with great pleasure that this album has arrived into my life, and plays as a triumph of music and life. I hear it as a reentry of sorts, a rebuilding -the songs contain specific wisdoms alongside sadness, elation, and wonder. To me, it is the sound of someone moving forward, while still acknowledging the things they have to carry to get there.

The oldest song on this record is “Little Ones”, which was started in 2015. It asks the question “What should I say to the little ones now?”, a fittingly heavy and human place to start the process. But I also hear a lot of light in tracks like “Heavy Shoulder” and “J’Amore”, which consider the possibility of new love and a life ahead. “First Landing” is about a horse, but also feels like tentative steps in a new atmosphere. Finally, the inclusion of a live audience on “Torn to Pieces” underscores the overall feeling of reemergence the album gives me.

The last decade has changed us all. Steve is remarried now. He met Dara in 2016, they moved their kids in together in lockdown and married in 2020. His voice still speaks to me, but it does so in a different way than it did in the mid-90s, when our biggest heartbreaks were still up ahead.

I’m thankful to be listening to this record right now. I’m happy for the comfort and familiarity of an old friend’s songs and voice. I’m excited to see all that he has (re)built. But I’m mostly ecstatic to see what comes next, to see how these songs greet the world, and what they might have to say to us all.

–Craig Finn