B-Side Guys

In a recycled milk carton on the edge of consciousness, Melissa Lingo – performing as meka – plants the seeds of something both earthly and ethereal. “Tomato Song,” the latest single from her upcoming album The Rabbit, blooms in the liminal space between waking life and dreaming, where mothers guard their gardens and daughters bargain with death.

Producer Daniel Bengtson’s deft touch at Stockholm’s Rymden Studios creates a landscape where Nick Drake-inspired fingerpicking intertwines with piano lines as delicate as morning dew. The gently brushed drums never intrude, instead providing a subtle heartbeat beneath meka’s crystalline vocals. Each element feels deliberately placed yet organic, like carefully tended rows in a garden plot.

The lyrics paint a series of vivid tableaux that slip between reality and reverie. “Back in the blue house/By the canyon, on the cliff,” she begins, before the narrative fragments into hieroglyphics and shouting crowds. The imagery grows increasingly surreal – standing on tables with cigarettes, digging graves for miscarried dreams – yet remains grounded by the concrete detail of her mother sleeping in the garden, protecting her crops from deer.

meka’s unconventional upbringing in an astronomical research town seems to inform the song’s cosmic scope, while her nomadic years across continents echo in its sense of displacement. “Tell me how to tell apart a dream from what’s real,” she pleads in the chorus, her layered harmonies creating a conversation with herself that never reaches resolution.

As the second single from The Rabbit, “Tomato Song” suggests an album that will transcend simple folk revival. While the press comparisons to Joan Baez and Vashti Bunyan aren’t unfounded, meka’s distinct perspective – shaped by mountain observatories and global wandering – yields something uniquely contemporary. She’s crafted a meditation on memory and mortality that, like her mother’s garden, transforms simple elements into something vital and sustaining.