Erik David Hidde has been making music entirely on his own terms for a long time – eleven albums under his previous moniker Prison Escapee, plus a debut Mohawk Castle album, all written, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered alone in his living room. The lo-fi aesthetic is deliberate, a choice that prioritises genuine feeling over studio polish. “In Moonlight” is the closing track on his sophomore Mohawk Castle album, due June 5th, and the origin story behind it is as personal as it gets: Hidde writes that following a spiritual encounter with the Holy Spirit, he was told he would meet his future wife at a worldwide church. He went looking. He found her, and his wife, Celina Nichole, independently reports having had her own encounter that brought her to the same place. The song is written to her, and the cover art layers Guido Reni’s 1638-39 “Portrait of a Woman” with Hidde’s own Los Angeles photography.
Thematically, the song explores how God reveals himself to us in many ways – in moonlight, in sunlight, in the wind, in the trees, wherever you look, God meets you where you’re at. Erik David Hidde explores this truth with absolutely devastating vocals accompanied by ambient piano lines and an electronic bass sound or 808 that functions as the pulse of the song alongside some sparse percussive elements, and they work to accentuate the power of the vocals to great effect. The vocals really do carry the song, though the truth comes through in the delivery; there is not a lick of performativity here, it’s the honest-to-God truth.
The song ends with the sound of a splashing wave – a deliberate nod to the lyric “I saw you in my dreams, in the middle of the sea, you were built for me” – and as a closing gesture, it earns its place. Hidde describes it as the saddest yet most luminous moment on the album, and both of those things are true at once, which is not easy to pull off. For music made in a living room with no external collaborators, the emotional reach here is considerable.