In the coming months, we’ll be touring the record with much of the personnel who recorded this album with us. I’m really glad that these songs reflect exactly what he, and we, were going through during this change in our lives together. On the record, he sings about how overwhelming those feelings were as they were coming to light for him in the song “Can’t Help Falling Apart”. For Dave, he realized that he wanted and needed to take time away from live touring. Given this, we’re fortunate to still be working together, in a democracy, as friends. We now have families and live in different towns. Enough time has passed-the 14 years that we’ve been together-that all of us have changed and grown. Have the individual band members’ personal circumstances changed, and influenced this new record in any way? I know one of the band has decided no longer to tour, and sings a song that articulates that, which is an unusual and very meta approach – what does David’s withdrawal from touring mean for the future of your live performances?Ĭertainly. This time at home also allowed me to reconnect with my family and to slow down. The physical separation from other band members, while challenging and painful, allowed more personal lyrics to emerge. Many of the songs and lyrics I’ve written since the pandemic have been more zoomed-in-a close-up view of how I’m feeling in my day-to-day…say on a particular walk, or when standing in my backyard, or when sitting in the kitchen with a family member. After years spent on the road, staying at home for a few years had a profound impact on my thinking, writing, and outlook on life. Have the difficult times we’ve endured since 2020, with pandemics and lockdowns, led you to reassess your lives and, in doing so, come to influence your music – both practically, in terms of touring and writing/rehearsing/recording, and also in terms of the themes in your songs?Ībsolutely. This is why the lyrics and performances are more individual and personal. We chose to make an album that honored this. After so much time apart, we were all moved to hear the unadulterated voices and feelings of each member. The songs were necessarily performed with sparse arrangements, featured solo vocals, and often had lyrics written entirely by one person. This was very different from our usual four-cooks-in-the-kitchen approach. After a season of songwriting, we decided to share some of the brand new tunes each of us were working on, debuting them for the audience and for each other for the first time during the concert. Was that method forced upon you from the limitations and restrictions of lockdown, or was it a natural (or planned) evolution of the group?ĭuring the pandemic, we had a series of live stream concerts in order to stay in touch with listeners and with each other. How would you characterise the principal differences between this album and the ones you’ve made before? The overall sound is in the same ballpark but there are new elements – most notably that each of you sings lead vocals individually, with the others harmonising. For me, this set of songs comes more from within-an introspective reckoning with the inevitability of change and finding peace in that. So while all living things will certainly die, all things, even dead things, are alive, dynamic, and shifting and changing if we look closely (or differently) enough. But in the chorus of this song, the opposite comes true for the daydreaming narrator-the clouds change and come to life as sea dogs, monsters, a blowing kite, bouncing basketballs. It deals with the sometimes-paralyzing fact that every living thing will die one day. For me, this song sums up a lot of the feelings I have when I listen to the record. Despite this, the album is named Everything Is Alive – it’s a lyric taken from our song Sea Dogs. Many of the songs on this record deal with a sense of loss, grief, or death. Is there an overriding theme to the songs on the new album, and do they come from the world outside or yourselves? On the eve of release, Tim Cooper asked band member Harris Paseltiner about the new album’s genesis and its recording. It finds them breaking away from their usual democratic songwriting process to embrace the individual strengths of band members Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner and David Senft – each taking centre stage in turn for the very first time. The acclaimed indie-folk quartet from New England are about to release their fifth album, Everything Is Alive, a record filled with themes of loss and the struggle for redemption.
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