Nashville, Tenn. -- June, 15, 2018 -- If The Stray Birds
were going to make another album, there was only one way it would
happen: together. The idea was at once a challenge, an ultimatum, and a
survival mechanism for a band at the crossroads. Write the record
collaboratively, or don’t write it at all. Let It Pass, the record resulting from the crossroads, is The Stray Birds’ most powerful, personal, and cathartic collection yet. Releasing September 7th on Yep Roc Records, Let It Pass charts the trio’s tumultuous emotional journey in the years since the release of their acclaimed 2016 album Magic Fire, a period which saw fiddler/guitarist/banjoist/
Today, the band released "Nothing To Say About It Now," the first single from the forthcoming album. Listen here.
Muench calls the song a meditation, a space where the listener can
suspend the past and future and listen to the moment. He explains that
“...during a lot of the writing of this record we were reckoning with
both past resentments and anxiety about where we were headed. The simple
one-note verse melody and the airy harmonies create otherworldly and
timeless qualities to the song while the backbeat feels like deep
breaths.” The band wrote “Nothing To Say About It” as a “haven for the
distracted, the overloaded, and the anxiety-ridden of today,” a truly
timely track for 2018. The Stray Birds take an unflinching look at
themselves in the mirror with this record and the first single, but it’s
not hard to zoom out and hear the parallels here with a divided nation
similarly navigating its way through a metaphorical maelstrom. Also announced today is the band’s 2018 fall tour with
dates ranging from early September in Philadelphia, PA, to late
November in Asheville, NC, routing through the midwest, along the West
Coast, and down into the southern United States-- with more dates to be
added in the coming weeks.
Let It Pass, the
band’s fourth studio album, developed over the course of what totaled
to nearly a month of dedicated writing sessions, the trio sat around a
table and, for the first time, created an entire album from scratch.
Where previously the band had been a showcase for the songwriting of de
Vitry or Craven, here all three members brought fragments of melodies
and sketches of verses, often generating music and lyrics together in
real time. Every phrase, every word, every melodic turn and chord change
had to travel through their collective imagination in order to make it
to the page.
“I
wanted everybody to experience wrestling with our collective state of
mind and the uncertainty that goes into writing music together,”
explains de Vitry. “It’s a delicate thing for people to create together
like that, but seeing each other in our moments of frustration and in
our creative breakthroughs created even more trust and possibility than
we’d ever had before. It enabled us to peel everything back and make the
most honest music we possibly could.”
Honesty
and beauty have long been hallmarks of The Stray Birds’ catalog.
Originally hailing from Lancaster, PA, the band first broke out in 2012
with their self-titled/self-released debut, which landed among NPR's
Top Ten Folk/Americana Albums of the Year and earned the trio major
festival performances everywhere from MerleFest to Scotland's Celtic
Connections. They followed it up in 2014 with Best Medicine, which debuted at #2 on the Billboard Bluegrass chart, and returned two years later with the Larry Campbell-produced Magic Fire, which hit #1 and earned an avalanche of critical praise. NPR hailed the band’s “warm harmonies” and “pristine playing,” while PopMatters heralded the album as “an essential step forward,” and Folk Alley called it “masterfully crafted.”
Unlike with previous records, the band took the new material that would end up being known as Let It Pass on
the road to Folk Alliance for a series of intimate live performances,
which provided a unique opportunity to step inside the songs and truly
live them before recording began. “Playing the new songs live was an
important step for us,” says de Vitry. “As soon as you’re performing a
song in front of an audience, it becomes all about communication, about
tapping into the lyrics and the feeling. It requires another kind of
vulnerability, and it was something we needed to do completely on our
own terms.”
By
the time the band hit the studio, they’d explored the material so
thoroughly and honed their performances so tightly that recording
sessions were wrapped in just five days. Album opener “The Bridge” says
it all, with de Vitry, Craven, and Muench joining in ecstatic harmony to
sing, “Meet me on the bridge / We can watch the water / Meet me on the
bridge / Water running under.” Like so much of the album, it’s a cry for
empathy and compromise that works on a variety of levels: personal,
professional, political.
From
the lilting “In My Time” and gentle “Light As A Fire” to the gritty
“Miles and Miles” and sentimental “If Time Is Not Enough,” change and
continuation are frequent themes on the album, but each track boils down
in its own way to an act of growth and healing. On the tender “Better
Than Bone,” de Vitry suggests that the power to carry on in the face of
sorrow or loss comes not from anger but forgiveness, proclaiming, “I’ll
be as strong as all the love I’ve ever known / All the love I’ve ever
shown.” It’s precisely the reason she felt so passionately that the band
needed to write (and experience the writing of) this album together.
“There
can be such a sense of loss at the end of any relationship, a sense
that the time and energy and emotion that went into it was wasted
because you have to start over,” says de Vitry. “But it’s all
worthwhile, and it's all a part of this journey. Loss actually creates
room for growth and strength."
That
sentiment is ultimately at the heart of the album. If we can accept
each other and ourselves for who we truly are, if we can live in our
pain as much as our joy and recognize that both contain equal potential
for evolution and self-discovery, if we can step out onto that bridge
and see the beauty in the endless flow of water running underneath, then
we’re going to be just fine. It might not always be easy, and it might
not always be fun, but the rewards will far outweigh the struggle.
Darkness will give way to new dawns, endings will give way to new
beginnings. “Hold it to the light and let it pass,” Craven sings on the
album, as much to himself and his bandmates as anyone else out there
listening, looking for answers in a world that keeps on spinning.
For more information, please visit https://www.thestraybirds.com/ and http://www.yeproc.com/. To pre-order the album, please click here.
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On Tour:
Mon. 8/4-6 Canmore, Alberta Canmore Folk Festival
Fri. 8/17 Manchester, VT Green Mountain Bluegrass Festival
Sat. 8/25 Asheville, NC Jam in the Trees
Thu. 9/6/18 Philadelphia, PA PFS Listening Room (Philadelphia Folk Society)
Fri. 9/7/18 Saratoga Springs, NY Cafe Lena
Sat - 9/8/18 Elizabethtown, NY Otis Mountain Getdown
Sun - 9/9/18 Montreal, QC Petit Campus
Wed - 9/19/18 Louisville, KY Zanzabar
Thu - 9/20/18 Chicago, IL The Hideout
Fri - 9/21/18 Minneapolis, MN The Cedar
Sat - 9/22/18 Lincoln, NE Lincoln Calling Festival
Sun - 9/23/18 Columbia, MO Rose Music Hall
Sun - 9/30/18 Cleveland, OH The Music Box
Mon - 10/1/18 Pittsburgh, PA Club Café
Tue - 10/2/18 Washington D.C. Union Stage
Wed - 10/3/18 Charlottesville
Thu - 10/4/18 Lancaster, PA Tellus 360
Fri - 10/5/18 New York, NY Mercury Lounge
Sat - 10/6/18 Boston, MA Sonia
Wed - 10/10/18 San Luis Obispo, C SLO Brewery
Thu - 10/11/18 Los Angeles, CA The Resident
Fri - 10/12/18 San Francisco, CA Brick and Mortar
Thu - 10/18/18 Portland, OR The Old Church
Fri 10/19/18 Spokane, WA The Bartlett
Sat - 10/20/18 Prosser, WA The Roots Cellar
Sun - 10/21/18 Seattle, WA Sunset Tavern
Thu - 11/1/18 Wray, CO 4th and Main
Fri - 11/2/18 Denver, CO Daniels Hall
Sat - 11/3/18 Basalt, CO The Temporary
Sun - 11/4/18 Ft Collins, CO Downtown Artery
Fri - 11/9/18 Houston, TX The Greenroom at Warehouse Live
Sat - 11/10/18 Austin, TX The Mohawk
Thu - 11/15/18 Atlanta, GA Eddie’s Attic
Fri - 11/16/18 Nashville, TN The Basement
Sat - 11/17/18 Asheville, NC The Grey Eagle
