Rectangles and Circumstance is an album of ten songs co-written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. The album follows their Grammy-winning Nonesuch debut, Narrow Sea, and their first record as a band, 2021’s Let the Soil Play Its Part, with Shaw on vocals backed by Sō—Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift) co-produced with them on both Let the Soil… and Rectangles and Circumstances.

Sliwinski says in the new album’s liner notes, “After a few years of touring Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part together, with a pandemic in between, we came to record our second album, Rectangles and Circumstance, as a road-tested band who knew each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies intimately.” He continues, “Most of the songs started with instrumental pieces or fragments of pieces from Jason or Eric.

“As both a songwriter and a classical composer, Caroline is accustomed to writing lyrics as well as setting them. Going over texts with her is like working on music: I collect a handful of poems and send them over to her, waiting to see if anything catches her interest, then I modify my search based on her feedback,” Sliwinski says. “For this album, Caroline, Eric, and I sourced a group of nineteenth-century poems that shaped its expressive mode [and] ended up using verses by Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake … The lyrics on this album by members of the band contain wordplay that explores the same profound feelings explored by Blake and Dickinson.”