Today the Welcome Wagon releases Esther, their fourth studio album with Asthmatic Kitty Records. The latest effort from the Brooklyn-based couple, the Reverend Thomas Vito Aiuto and his wife Monique, is as much about homecoming as it is about making peace with — and a home in — uncertainty. 

Admittedly, for a gospel duo, there’s far less soul than sweet sincerity in the casual songs of the Welcome Wagon, from whom pretense is nowhere to be found. Like their previous records, Esther doesn’t feign emotion or pretend to be anything more than it is: an honest and humble outpouring of devotion amid a search for meaning in the company of family and friends, of which I am grateful to be a part. 

 

Meaghan K. Ritchey: I loved Esther! It was a deep consolation to me — a sort of long-awaited gift — which is an unusual reaction from me, even with my favorite bands. Do you keep your audience in mind while you’re writing? What’s your hope upon releasing your first album in five years? 

WW: We want our songs to be a companion to that special time people spend alone cleaning the house or washing the dishes. You used the word gift, Meg. From the very beginning it has felt like a gift to even get to make music at all. These recordings wouldn’t be possible without a lot of people — chief among them Sufjan — but others, too, who invited us to be musicians. Monique is a trained painter, and I am a writer, so we knew how to create, but to be invited to make music with extremely talented, gracious people, is a gift.

But it’s also emotionally demanding. Daniel Smith of Danielson Famile talks about this a lot. He used to perform in a tree! He told me once that making music is “sort of humiliating,” and I corrected him and said, “You mean humbling?” He replied, “No, I mean humiliating.” He didn’t mean it in a shameful way; he meant it in a Christocentric way. Music is supposed to be participation in a selfless outpouring of oneself: a gift received; a gift given. 

Esther was made in the crucible of the coronavirus, too. Everyone was looking for something to lift them out of the morass of that terrible time — people needed help. This is our offering to that end. Our second album was called Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. We thought of it as a balm. And that hope — of making a gracious medicine, or whatever — drove this album as well.

MKR: Say more about your community as a source of inspiration, and not only that, but as a source of generative creativity. 

WW: Our church community has always been very special to us. Our music is for them as much as it is for each other. They’re always on our minds, and many of them play on this record. This may sound trite, but you know one of the golden rules for musicians? “Make sure you’re always the worst musician in the room,” which is not a very difficult feat for Monique or I to accomplish, because our friends are so talented. But that community is vital in how the music emerges. When I write the songs, they’re just architectural plans that I hand off to the builders and masons and plumbers and the other sort of crafts people around it. They make it beautiful. It’s like being at a family gathering and passing your baby around. 

MKR: This is fourth album in fifteen years. 

WW: We’re really picking up the pace! 

MKR: A little bit. I was at your first album release show in 2008. I think you’re moving along well given that you both had very full-time jobs.

WW: I guess that’s true. We write when we can. 

MKR: Tell us about your songwriting and production process. And can you share about the texts, translations, and other recordings that came together to create Esther. 

WW: Over the pandemic Monique left her job as a teacher to spend more time on art, making large mixed-media assemblages, in which she integrates tons of ephemera from her grandmother Esther — paper clippings, notes, fabric. And so literally, as I was working out arrangements in the living room, she was here painting and playing tape recordings of her grandmother reading the Bible aloud. In a lot of ways, the album is a product of pandemic proximity and a craving for release. 

In a lovely way, the form, structure, and concept ended up getting imposed on the songs after we stepped back and heard and saw what we’d made. It wasn’t about making a concept record, but the concept was impossible to ignore given the way the songs came to be. And then Monique decided to do a painting for every song on the album. So there was this ongoing, complementary cycle of the paintings affecting the songs, and vice versa. 

MKR: Monique, tell me about the paintings and what has emerged from that practice. 

WW: I was spending a lot of time at home, looking over things that I had inherited from my grandmother, the audio tapes of her reading the Bible that she had sent me. It’s unpredictable work. It’s kind of risky. But we’re taking that road right now, and I am excited for everyone to see it.

MKR: Let’s talk about some songs. “I Know You Know” and “Consolation Blues” simultaneously explore knowledge, intimacy, and resolution and their opposites mystery, distance, surrender — all within the space of a few stanzas. 

WW: Our friend Steven Purcell wrote an entry for the back jacket of the album leaflet that said, basically, Monique and Vito sing about knowing that the world to come is not like this world as if they’re trying to convince themselves. He’s right. We’re staking a lot of our hope — a lot of our sanity — on the reality that the world to come is different. 

And when we repeat “You know?” over and over in both songs, I won’t pretend that we’re not trying to connect with the listener. We are. We want to understand and we have a need to be understood. It creates a bond. It’s lovely when you know someone knows and loves you. We want people to know how much God loves them, ultimately. If in a very simple, primitive sense that happens with the songs, we’re relieved. 

MKR: The love songs to God and to neighbor are gentle and lovely, like “Knocking on the Door of Love.” Other songs remind me that the album was written by a married couple. 

WW: The songs are a platform to express that love and devotion, too. When we perform we very often sing to each other. 

MKR: Tell me about “Isaiah, California.” 

WW: That song has lots of memories from our sabbatical in Italy and California, moments that we remembered when we came back. Monique had put our names on our toiletries with a label-maker. So imagine: MONIQUE: TOOTHPASTE, VITO: SOAP. Our son Isaiah used a soap brand called “California Baby.” One day while I was brushing my teeth, I looked at the bottle and it said, ISAIAH CALIFORNIA BABY. It killed me. It had to be a song. 

It isn’t about anything. I think that about all my songs: they’re not about something else. They are what they are. Same with “Isaiah, California.” Yes, inside of it there’s the story about the difficulty of marriage, and then the healing that can come, but really I just found this way of playing a D chord that I loved, and then it became a waltz, and I wanted to use my favorite chord transition — D to F. It’s a transition that isn’t natural. You don’t want to hear it, but I had to play it. 

It’s like Monique’s paintings — assemblage. She loves this paint, and this paper, and this composition, and this story. Let’s put them all together on a canvas. The songs are the same kind of construction, of memory, sound, and poetry.

 

You can order Esther and prints of Monique’s artwork on the Asthmatic Kitty website. Keep an eye out for upcoming tour dates. 

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