Sari Lightman Announces Solo Debut The Way I Saw You, Produced by Meg Duffy

Sari Lightman, long associated with the twin-led psychedelic, pop and folk projects Tasseomancy and Lightman & Lightman, is finally stepping out on her own. Her solo debut, The Way I Saw You, arrives next month, with Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy behind the boards. Duffy had already worked with Lightman on the 2024 Lightman & Lightman record Sister Smile, and the new album also pulls in players connected to St. Vincent, Cola, Perfume Genius, and others. The title track, which opens the record, is out now.

“The Way I Saw You” makes its case quickly: wispy melody, celestial harmonies, and a strange, grounded folk feeling that sits somewhere between present-day writers like Bedouine and Jessica Pratt and the older English folk tradition of Bridget St. John. It’s an eerie song, but not in a theatrical way. By the end, the title line has hardened into something like a spell, repeated until it feels less like a lyric than a conviction.

Lightman says the song began with Eve Babitz, and the quote she offers gives the track its emotional frame. She imagines a journalist facing Babitz “decades into Babitz’s reclusive period after an accident left her disfigured,” and considers the gap between the public myth and the lived, compromised body. Lightman writes:

A journalist sits across from the writer Eve Babitz, decades into Babitz’s reclusive period after an accident left her disfigured. She yearns to be remembered the way she was in her writing – sensual and carefree. To live in the rose, immortal, blossoming inside a body of work. There is a lot to be said about an Artists’ myth when in reality, the human experience is much messier, undignified – not to mention the cruelty pelted onto beautiful women as they age. Instead I went down a theological rabbit hole with the rose. I thought about Dante’s Paradise and all those feminine saints stashed in the petals, like an exquisitely scented sexy hotel. ‘Let Eve live here’ I thought.”

The Way I Saw You is set for release on 6/26 via Night Bloom Records. The album runs eight songs: “The Way I Saw You,” “The Prize,” “Day of the Just Cause,” “Girl Bitten By A Lizard,” “Etty,” “Give It All Up,” “Rose is In Greece,” and “Soon Came The Evening.” Pre-order it here.