Earlier this week, Shearwater released the closing track and final preview of their latest album, The New World, revealing its biggest surprise. If you’ve looked at the tracklist, you’ll already be expecting Laurie Anderson’s voice to take you on some kind of journey, even if you have to wait well over a minute for it to creep up on you. Listening to my promo copy for the first time, I was thrown totally off guard, but the guest appearance made sense as soon as I realized who it was; Anderson helped inspire fragments of the last Loma record, including the title, How Will I Live Without a Body?, as Jonathan Meiburg explained to me in an interview a couple of years back. “Hey buddy,” she begins on ‘You and Your Dog’. “It’s sure been a long time.”
It has, indeed, been quite some time since Shearwater – currently a trio comprising Meiburg, his Loma bandmate Dan Duszynski, and Emily Lee – put out a new record. In the four years since The Great Awakening, Meiburg has been traveling, researching his next book, and participating in collaborative projects, making space for his musical and scientific work to intersect and seep into the next Shearwater record. Despite being the band’s first crowdfunded release after six albums with Sub Pop and Matador Records, the result is their most ambitious and rich-sounding effort to date, brimming with curious instrumentation as alive to their environment as the sounds of ravens, blackbirds, and coyotes that are folded into the mix. It urges you to pay more attention, ultimately suggesting there’s no better way to be heard than to step back and let someone else – a stranger, an animal, a new, soon-to-be-old friend – do the talking.
We caught up with Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg to talk about Antarctica, Laurie Anderson, Yuquot, and other inspirations behind their new album, The New World.
The Once and Future Life of Antarctica
In terms of the timeline, there’s some overlap between you working on The New World and this book called The Once and Future Life of Antarctica. I don’t know what stage the book is currently at, but I’m curious how you saw the projects bleeding into each other, and whether you can see those threads more clearly now.
Very much so. For the past decade now, I have been working on music and book projects simultaneously, and they inevitably overlap. My first book, A Most Remarkable Creature, had to do with the natural history of South America and these strange birds called caracaras that live there, and the people who live with them. As part of research these books, you end up having to go places, and then the places bring you images and sounds and thoughts. On our last album, The Great Awakening, I included some recordings that I’d made in Guyana as part of research for that book. They are some of my favorite moments on that record. There’s a toucan solo in the middle of the song ‘Aqaba’, and there’s a recording of howler monkeys at the end of the song ‘Xenarthran’. To me, those are some of the best integrations of field recordings that I’d made up to that point in music, because they seemed to be not just background for the music; they were part of the music itself.
I wanted to expand on that in the new album. The new album coincided with my work in this book, called The Secret Land: The Once and Future Life of Antarctica, which I’m now in the confusing middle of. But there was a lot of fieldwork for that as well, in Tasmania, in Oman, in Chile, and then in Antarctica itself, where I spent two months this past year. That yielded not only the cover images for the album, but also many of the field recordings you hear throughout it. With The Great Awakening, because it was made during the pandemic, everything felt very heavy and very still in a kind of oppressive way, and I think some of that comes out in that album. But now, it seems that everything’s lurched into motion, and like a river and flood, it’s both very beautiful and also frightening. I think that’s reflected in the music.
When you’re contemplating the Antarctic, it’s a place that’s been a center of change on our planet for quite a long time – it’s really been driving the climate and the life of our world, which is part of the subject of my book. I wanted to write a book about Antarctica that was not about penguins, seals, whales, polar explorers, and melting ice sheets. I wanted to talk about everything else, because there are so many other things to talk about when you talk about life in Antarctica. My hope is to reveal that in a way that’s delightful and surprising to readers, and so the music flowed from those thoughts and those energies.
I have to say that the last time we talked was the catalyst for me to at least become curious about birdwatching. A lot of times when I reach for my phone these days, it’s to open the Merlin Bird ID app.
Oh, it’s great. More than anything, I think that that app has helped to make people more aware of a part of the world that was always there, that they weren’t necessarily paying attention to. And that’s really the fun of watching or looking at the natural world, whether it’s birds or mammals. It’s remembering the thing that the internet wants you to forget, which is that we are not the only story on this planet. There’s a much older story that we were a part of, and if you look carefully, you can start to see its outlines. So much of our own misery is caused by being too focused on ourselves. And these things provide a wonderful, instant way of getting outside your own mind, thinking about the perspective of other living things, and over a longer time scale than just a human life.
Dandysounds Studio in Dripping Springs, TX
That’s where we begin. Dandysounds Studio is in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is about 45 minutes west of Austin, out in the Texas Hill Country, and it’s where we made all of the previous record. The studio is in Dan Duszynski’s house out there, which is a fascinating house that was built by the landlords out of rammed earth, so the walls are really thick. It has a peculiar sound to it that I think is very beautiful. There’s a lot of land surrounding it. There are animals, there’s a lot of wildlife if it’s been raining. It’s a very wild-feeling place, and it’s kind of our home studio in that the Loma records were mostly made there, the last Shearwater record, and this one began its life there. It’s a place exploration and experimentation, just making sounds without thinking too hard about what they’re going to become, because I like to begin with sound and then move towards the words with songs rather than the other way around.
It has the comfortable feeling of home; it also has the problems of home, in that you can be too comfortable. So, once we worked there for several weeks, beginning the sketches and outlines of songs – this is a difference in process now, compared to the way it used to be when we worked in the analog realm, in that rather than making a demo and then basically redoing the demo with better equipment, or when you’d learn the song a bit better, these things kind of accrete on top of each other within a session, like geological layers. Somewhere down there at the bottom of the session file is the original – you’re feeling out the song, but it may have changed tempo, every single thing you did may have been replaced, or there may be a few elements that remain, all the way from the very first attempt at the song to the end. Which I think is wonderful, because it lets you keep some of the things that were entrancing about a demo if you liked it, rather than the time-honored and futile process of chasing the demo, where you try to recapture something that was good about your initial performance, which is kind of intrinsically impossible for some reason.
I’ve wandered off into the field here – Dandysounds, it almost feels as if time has stopped out there, as if the same day happens over and over and over again. The same rhythm of the day happens over and over again. The dogs go out, you feed the dogs, you get to work, you have some breakfast, you go back to work again. The outside world really doesn’t intrude very much except when you go to the grocery store. And that’s a wonderful place, sort of a petri dish. On the other hand, the risk of it is that if you become too accustomed to that process, you don’t ever finish anything; you just begin lots of things. This time, because we could actually move around, we started then to take the record to other places, all three of us, me and Dan and Emily.
Emily Lee, I should say, is the third member of the Shearwater team, as of now; she and I and Dan have been the trio at the heart of it for the last two albums. And Emily is an excellent keyboard player, but what I really love her participation in the band because she has really good judgment, so she often ends up assuming a sort of producer role. Which makes her somewhat invisible in the final product, but she’s actually extremely present. It’s just that you don’t realize that the reason she’s present is because she’s helped to make so many different decisions about when something is right, about when something can be improved.
Since the last Loma record also took shape there, did you find that The New World was influenced by Loma in a particular way, or like the boundaries were clearer?
I don’t know. Were you influenced by the version of yourself from last year?
Right.
You pick things up and put things down along the way in life. Certainly, there were approaches that we refined or discovered on the Loma record The New World. It’s like, these were the people who were there, this is the experience you were all having together, and in looking through a scrapbook you’re like, “Oh man, I forgot my hair was that long.” [laughs] You didn’t notice these things because they were happening to you and they were happening day by day.
But I will say that, for me, there’s a break right after the Shearwater record called Jet Plane and Oxbow, which we did with Danny Reisch, who mixed the new record, to the first Loma record, which was the next project I worked on after Shearwater had toured with Cross Record, which was Dan Duszynski and Emily Cross, and the three of us are Loma – I suggested to them during that tour that we make a record together. If you listen to those two records back to back, they’re just so different, and that’s one of the artistic – I don’t want to say feats, because that seems overblown, but I’m just so proud of the difference between those two records. One is so big, so hi-fi, so extroverted, and the Loma record sounds like it’s got dirt and hair all over it, seems much more, sort of, inward and mysterious. I felt like I had discovered something important by working on that record, especially, and trying to bring those two paths in line with one another, I think, has been the project of the last few albums.
Figure 8 Studio in Brooklyn, NY
Similarly to what you described with Emily, you look at the credits and realize Shahzad Ismaily, who owns the studio, forms a lot of the record’s rhythmic backbone, but I’m sure his influence stretches way beyond what’s written in the credits.
Shahzad is fascinating. If you look at musicians playing now who know Shahzad, it seems like everyone you meet, because Shahzad, I think, kind of prides himself on this being this nexus point between many different scenes, many different communities of musicians. And his studio, Figure 8 in Brooklyn, reflects this, in that there’s an upstairs studio and a downstairs studio, and a little break room out the front. Everyone’s always flowing through these spaces, including, at the time, Shahzad’s mom, who’s since passed, and his daughter. It felt like people were always coming and going; sometimes you’ll be working in the control room in the upstairs studio, and then somebody will just pop up from the stairs from the downstairs studio who’s been working on something, and you’ll say, “Come and listen to this.”
Just as an example of how Shahzad is, we were about to pack up for, I think it was the second session we did at Figure 8. We never worked there for very long, just for three or four days at a time, but they were always intensely productive days. But before the second time we went there, Shahzad called and said, [in a low, calm voice] “So, I just wanted you to know that, there’s these Malian musicians from – do you know what a ngoni is?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s thought of as the precursor of the banjo, it’s like a spike loop thing.” He’s like, “Yeah, well, they’re in this ensemble called Ngoni Ba, and some of the members aren’t here, but they’re going to be playing here next week, and I think they’re looking for some gigs, and I wondered if you would like them to play on your record.” [laughs] I was like, “The answer is yes, Shahzad. They’re gonna be so good that I’m not sure that we can hang, but no matter what, we’ll certainly learn something incredible from that experience.”
Shahzad is bold enough to suggest this, and also receptive to however that might turn out. So we arrived the next day, set all our stuff up, started working, and then three of them [Mamadou Kouyate, Moctar Kouyate, and Mahamadou Tounkara] showed up. We had extended a few sections of some songs to try to give them some room in which to work with a tempo, essentially. I thought, “I really don’t want to include this if it just doesn’t mesh.” But they very patiently sat down, listened, conferred, and then went in and started playing against these tracks, and the stuff they did was wonderful. It changed the songs completely, and I just remember the hair standing up on the back of my neck, thinking, “Wow, this is suddenly becoming something beyond what I ever imagined it could be.” That was a really stunning moment, and that’s the kind of thing that happens at Figure 8.
I wouldn’t work there if I wanted to shut out the entire world, because there’s just so much energy flowing through it. But that’s a wonderful place to add all kinds of decorations, pursue avenues that you might not have considered with the songs, play with some wonderful old bits of studio gear that are legendary in one way or another. And it just changes your sense of what’s possible. I felt like the record really became more three-dimensional at that point, because there were so many other energies flowing into it. And Shahzad himself we also hired to work for a couple of days. And Shahzad can play lots of different instruments, so we just squeezed him like a sponge and said, “How about playing on this song? How about you play drums here? How about bass? How about synthesizer?” Which left us with a lot of editing to do, because he works very fast and has lots of ideas all the time. But if you then have the patience to then sit and work through that, it’s just magical, the stuff that he produces and the way that he plays.
I really thought that the album the color saturation on the album became much more intense at Figure 8. And that’s where we worked with not just the guys from Ngoni Ba, but also Firaz Zriek, who played qanun. He was recording with a Palestinian music ensemble in the downstairs studio. Lia Pikus came in and played cello; we had a lot of fun putting her through the Leslie speaker. And then, of course, Doug Wieselman, who plays clarinet and saxophone on the album, was also recorded there.
I have say, I’ve spoken with several musicians who’ve worked with Shahzad, and I think it’s the first time someone has attempted an impression of him in any way. [laughter] It also gives me a stronger sense of the relationship between the space and and him as a multi-instrumentalist and producer.
Yeah, the space somehow reflects who Shahzad is in this very curious way. I really love him and feel, like many people do, like he’s my friend now. I’m hoping that he’s gonna work with us on this project that I’ve got coming up where I’ve assembled this big ensemble to perform the last two Talk Talk records. That’s been a process running in the background for years now, and I think it may finally come to fruition in 2029. But we really bonded over this because Shahzad really loves those records, too. And if you have that as a foundation for what you like in music, it’s very easy to communicate.
I don’t think I have anything else that specific to look forward to in 2029, but there we go.
It gives you some faith that there will be a 2029, doesn’t it? Like, “I’ve got that coming up, the world won’t be a smoking hole in the ground at that point. It can’t be because we have to play these shows.”
The Shelter in London, UK
Shahzad was also the one who brought together The Shelter Collective in the summer of 2024.
He did, yes. That was a session that he invited me to be part of with Peni Candra Rini, the incredible Indonesian singer. And I just said yes, because it sounded interesting. I was living in Germany at the time, so it wasn’t very far. That was just an extraordinary couple of days, and that was in Leo Abrahams’ studio called The Shelter, which is in Hackney in London. So I got to meet Leo in his capacity as an engineer, quasi-producer, although Shahzad was producing that session, and this ensemble of just extraordinarily talented people: Seb Rockford playing drums, Alabaster de Plume playing saxophone, Shahzad. I mostly played banjo, I think, in that session, and then sometimes guitar or piano. Steve Jones – not the one from the Sex Pistols – and there were others, too.
It was a really intense moment of making these improvisations. I’ve not done anything like that in a long time, and Pei is a force of nature. She is just so extraordinary as a performer. She can invent entire songs on the spot, including lyrics. And she seems to contain several different… entities, I guess I would say. Sometimes she can sound like an absolute demon from hell, and then sometimes she can sing the most beautiful, bird-like, delicate melodies. She just has incredible control over her voice.
That was how I was introduced to Leo Abrahams, and I asked Leo if he would like to work on the record as well. He had some time, so we booked in with him. Emily and I traveled out to work with Leo; Dan stayed back in the US. But the three of us were sitting in Leo’s studio, which is almost the opposite of Shahzad’s studio in that it’s like a library – it’s this beautiful, sacred feeling space that you feel that nothing will intrude here, but it’s also very tidy, unlike the Dandysounds environment. It was a really good place to be overanalytical about the songs. Leo helped us with many things, but especially that, going, “Okay, you’ve got all this material. How are we going to sculpt this into something more coherent that has a single through line? Are the sounds correct?”
Leo’s worked with Brian Eno quite a bit, and I felt that you could sense some of his influence in the way that Leo works, which is a little more intellectual, which is exactly what we needed at that time to get these songs under control. Start figuring out what was important, what was needed, what wasn’t needed, what might need to be replaced. So that was where we really edited and shaped the songs. And Leo, even though he’s a fantastic musician – he’s a really distinctive and interesting guitar player – he never inserted himself. You had to practically pull on him to get him to play on the record. He was always more interested in what you might do. I felt like I made a friend there, too.
Do you remember a certain detail that you really scrutinized together?
Piano sounds are a big deal to me, for some reason, I don’t even really know why. It just really bugs me when pianos don’t sound exactly right. Leo had a beautiful piano in his studio that I knew had the right sound for these two songs that I’d put a piano at Shahzad’s on, and it just wasn’t quite the right attack on that piano to mean the thing that I wanted it to mean. We ended up replacing some of those tracks with Leo’s piano. There are tracks on the record that have three or four different pianos on them; not that you’d notice, it’s just that sometimes even between sections in songs, there’ll be a different piano.
The saxophonist Travis Laplante
I know you worked with him on the David Bowie Berlin Trilogy tribute, which was a big undertaking.
The last live performance that Shearwater did was in 2018, working with WNYC’s New Sounds program in New York to stage a three-night reconstruction of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes, and Lodger. We did it live in this place called the Winter Garden Atrium at Brookfield Place, which is this very fancy, complicated shopping mall under the World Trade Center that’s connected to that insane Calatrava train station/shopping area that they built. But it’s a weird space to perform in, because there are all these palm trees, and there’s all this big glassed-in area behind you. But it’s big, and I think we had more than 6,000 people come to see it. Then it was recorded, and it was broadcast multiple times on WNYC after we mixed it. The ensemble was the Jet Plane and Oxbow-era Shearwater, plus some more guests, including Ed Rodriguez from Deerhoof, who was our Robert Fripp/Adrian Belew stand-in, because he’s just an absolute wizard on the electric guitar. Eliot Krimsky, who played synths, and Jamie Stewart, who I split vocal duties with because I didn’t want there to be one Bowie. You know, you can’t be David Bowie, so I thought by actually splitting the singing, even within the songs, that helped to diffuse that energy a bit.
Tthe big iconic saxophone parts on those records, like in ‘Subterraneans’ and the instrumental ‘Neuköln’ on Heroes – that’s all Bowie playing sax. So Travis, in a way, also had to be Bowie. I’ll confess that I never really have liked the saxophone all that much, but Travis is changing my mind. He is such an expressive and interesting and beautiful player. He has a tenor saxophone quartet called Battle Trance, who’ve made some really beautiful records. One called Blade of Love, in particular, I can recommend. He can play almost Ornette Coleman-style jazz stuff, really far out. But also, he released a record recently that I absolutely love called Estuary that’s just single notes sustained for a really long period of time. It’s incredibly beautiful.
He’s one of my favorite musicians, and he has such a purity of intent about him. He’s just such a kind, open person, and you hear that in how he plays. I would say he’s had a big influence on me, musically, even though he does not play in The New World. But we were able to get Doug Wieselman, who’s been around for forever and played with everybody – I met him through Laurie Anderson. The other saxophone player, Walter Nichols, is a friend of Dan’s; we used a recording that he’d made with Dan that never was used for anything as part of one of our songs. And then, of course, my friend Peter Lettre came in to play upright bass on a couple of songs, and he brought his 14-year-old son, Henry, who is learning to play the saxophone, so Henry had his first recording session ever with us. There’s a song called ‘The High Ranges’ that has both Doug playing in a sort of Ethiopian style and Henry playing in his first take of his first recording session ever at the same time. They’re so different it almost sounds like two different instruments, and it’s one of my favorite moments on the record.
Henry was so sweet. He had his saxophone with him, and I said, “Okay, let’s just set you up in here, and here’s a microphone, here’s some headphones. We’re gonna play the track back to you, just play along in the key, do anything you like, and don’t worry because you can’t screw up.” And he just stared at me for a minute and said, “You mean… I shouldn’t screw up?” [laughs] And then we let him go and we were just listening. It was like, “Oh, he’s doing really well.” He got to the end of the take, and we’re like, “That’s great. I’m sure there’s stuff we can use in there.” I made sure I paid him for the session, his first recording session. I was so happy about that.
Laurie Anderson
You said you met Doug through Laurie Anderson, who we talked about her as an inspiration in the context of the last Loma record. How did she actually come on board for ‘You and Your Dog’? What’s the story there?
Over the last 10 years, Laurie has slowly become my fairy godmother, and I don’t understand how that happened exactly, but she invited me to be the science advisor on this giant project she worked on for many years called ARK, which was eventually staged in Manchester. But “science advisor” went by the wayside pretty quickly, and then I became part of the story working group, and then I was in it as a performer at one point. She was going to have multiple characters; she got rid of that idea. Then I appeared as an AI illustration in the show at a few places, and, along with the rest of the story group, helped shape the piece in one way or another.
But the result of all that was that I was at a lot of meetings, virtual and in person, with Laurie and her team over several years, including the more than a month in Manchester putting on the show. And I really got to know her, got to know her associates, got to see her working, and really working things out up until the last minute, which I hadn’t realized was how she works. But she is ready to revise things in major ways at the very, very end of the process. If you watch several of her shows over time, you see that it’s not exactly that she’s recycling material, it’s more that she’s constantly refining this thing, even as it’s moving underneath and around her, and so you’ll see pieces from past pieces that work their way into new ones, in different contexts so they mean something different. She’s very good at assembling all of these different fragments that she’s created over time and using that as a sort of a vocabulary to make something new.
I was really inspired by watching her fearlessness in this process. She just doesn’t give up on a thing until she feels that it is right, and it doesn’t matter what that takes. She’ll also entertain any idea, but she’s good at throwing them out, too. It’s like, “Well, what if we had an orchestra doing this? What if we had a choir? What if we did it in a skyscraper? What if it’s underwater?” The most outrageous ideas get thrown out pretty quickly, but she does consider them. And I just really loved that kind of limitless feeling that she has in her imagination, in how she conceives what a performance should be.
But then also, it’s not just her. Even though when you watch a show that she’s doing, she’s often manipulating the video, the levels of various different tracks that she’s playing – she’s playing, she’s singing, she’s dancing sometimes; it’s incredible the amount of things she can do by herself. But still, she has a team around her of people who are intensely creative and pragmatic and are able to make these things work. Anytime you see something that looks big and complicated, there’s almost always a team of people behind it, even if they’re not the face of it. And when I think about the team that we managed to assemble for this album – gosh, if you could get all those people on a stage or on a production, it’d be blazing. I’m so proud of the people who we managed to assemble to work on it.
I also saw that she blurbed your first book, A Most Remarkable Creature.
She did. I was introduced to her through a mutual friend and had met her a few times before that, but after she read the book, it was sort of like a calling card. I just feel very lucky to have gotten to know her and work with her and be inspired by her. I mean, she’s almost 80, and she’s touring in Europe right now with a big band. She just does not stop. And that’s really inspiring.
So, what was the seed for ‘You and Your Dog’?
The final track on the album came from a little piano phrase that I made up just idly while I was waiting for Dan to get something ready in the studio in Texas. I just made a track that was just that piano figure over and over, and we started adding to it and putting more little elements in it. I love that it just sort of sits there in this one state that is changing, but it’s also always the same at the same time. I tried singing over it, and I was just bored with what I was coming up with. I really didn’t like the sound of my voice, I didn’t like the melodies I had in mind. I just sat there with this piece, and while I was working with Laurie in Manchester on the ARK project, I was listening to her constantly, refining the the text of that show. I thought, “Maybe I could get Laurie to read something over this. But read what?”
So I tried some different quotes from things, and then I wrote out this little story. I thought, “I bet she’d sound really good reading this story.” I sent it to her and I said, “Look, I don’t like the sound of my own voice doing this, but I would love it if you would do it.” She said, “I’d be happy to.” So then a couple months later, she did two takes of the story and sent it to us. I was back in Texas with Dan doing some editing on the record, and the takes were interesting because they were very different. They came from completely different emotional places. One of them seemed sort of more cold and removed, and the other was much more emotional. And we ended up combining the two into the narrative as you hear it on that song.
I love that she just appears next to you when you’ve been listening to about a minute and a half of music, and it’s like, “Hey buddy.” [laughs] She’s just standing right next to you. And then she tells you this story. Because you trust her voice. It’s just a voice that you believe in, whether you know who she is or not. You trust her to lead you somewhere. And the place that she leads you to in this song is a bit unsettling. And then the record sort of drops you off there in this really long, long, long fade. It’s a that we recorded at Leo’s, which is a hurdy-gurdy – you know how you’re turning this little crank that makes contact with some strings to make this sound? Well, that’s just the sound of the crank, with the strings muted. It’s this tiny little sound that seems it’s very close to you and seems to be almost inside your ear; one you might imagine while you’re falling asleep or something. And then some coyotes appear there at the very end that we recorded in Los Angeles where we were mixing the record.
The combination of takes creates a really interesting contrast, because you hear this voice that’s warm in its familiarity, almost sentimental, but then also unsettling.
Like a curdled memory or something, or maybe a clearer one. I felt when we were done with that track, and as it was shaping up, that this is really something special, and I couldn’t think of where else you would put it. You’d have to put it at the end of the record. Anytime you’re working on a project, it’s always helpful to know what the beginning is and what the end is, and so we knew at that point, as we were assembling the record, that we’re working towards that moment.
Did she tell you anything about the story or did you just record it? No. She said later, “Reading it, I felt like this was almost like a memory I had, like this is something that had actually happened to me.” But I was just thrilled that it worked. I tried to write it to her strike zone, and she really hit it out of the park.
Yuquot, Nootka Island, British Columbia
Yuquot is a village on the southern tip of Nootka Island, and it’s a fascinating place for many reasons. There’s not enough time to get into it now, but it is the place where Captain Cook, James Cook, called in and first met First Nations people in North America, on the west coast. When his ships arrived, they came into this little cove called called Friendly Cove, because the people there were very friendly to them, but what they saw was extraordinary. They saw these multi-story wooden buildings, totem poles, and all the features of the material culture that is so extraordinary in that region. You had these two people looking at each other, and of course, it didn’t turn out very well for First Nations people, Native American people, this contact with Europeans. But this was the very first moment of that, and it happened right there.
When you go there, It’s an extraordinary place. It has a feeling that I’ve never felt anywhere else. There’s a broad green lawn, these big hedges of blackberry that are absolutely crammed with bumblebees and birds. There’s a well – you have to lift the lid if you want to fill up on some water, and the well seems somehow to be glowing? I don’t understand this, it seemed to be glowing with blue light. I know this is an optical illusion of some kind, but at the same time, it’s what you see. And it’s at the southern end of a thing called the Nootka Trail, which is a beautiful multi-day trail that runs down the west coast of the island through old-growth forest. There’s still only one family that lives there now, because the people who used to live there were mostly coerced into moving further inland several decades ago, but there is still one family remaining there.
There’s also a shrine that gets called the Whaler’s Shrine that used to be on the island. It’s really fascinating and eerie – ritual objects that were part of a ritual related to catching whales, which people there used to do; they used to hunt whales from canoes on the sea, if you can imagine this. And they’re not in the style that you associate with Pacific Northwest people. They seem much older and wilder and more rough-hewn, and I don’t know when they come from, I don’t know how old they are, but this had been removed from there and put in a museum in the U.S. a long time ago, and it had just been returned to the island at the time that I visited. They didn’t know exactly how they were going to handle it, but it was being housed in the church there, which is closed. And just knowing that that was there, this “much too little, much too late, but still nonetheless present attempt at a kind of cultural restitution or restoration – it was very moving.
The thought of this place as a as this contact point on which the hinge of human history turned in that part of the world – it’s still working on me, and it’s part of why I wanted to use the title The New World. I’m not the first to use that title for something, but in this case, there’s the new world that we’re entering now, a world of conflict and turmoil and digital muck encrusting itself all over everything. But what happened in the so-called New World – there was this contact between groups of people who’d been separate for a long time, and all of the energy that was unleashed by that confrontation. That’s not all fitted in the album, of course, but it’s present. It’s what I was thinking.
You said it’s still working on you. How so?
The project of the books and the records both is an attempt to catch a glimpse of where we really are. That’s the thing that I wish more people spend more time thinking about: what it really means to be living on Earth, what Earth is, what it means to be a living thing. What the other living things here are doing. Because this vanishes from your mind the moment you open your phone – or really the moment you wake up, most of the time. It’s hard to bend your mind towards it. I’m not saying that other people are ignorant and I’m enlightened or anything like that. It’s just, as a human being, you build a world in your mind and you interact with it, and it has more or less a relationship to the world that’s actually here.
If there’s one thing I would like to do in my life, I would like to have the world in my mind reflect more of the world that there actually is, as much as I can. The feeling that I had at Yuquot, the things that I saw deep below the sea, on the ice shelves. The things I see every day – coyotes in Central Park – that are parallel to this human world that we’re so preoccupied with, are the things that make reality clearer to me. And if there’s something that I would like my work to do ultimately, it would be to offer that. If I’ve had that experience, also offer it to someone else.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Shearwater’s The New World is out July 31 via Polyborus.
