New Album Nearly Complete

When we began recording Fellow Travelers a year ago, we’d already started working on Jet Plane and Oxbow, and it was strange to return to it after the Fellow Travelers tours of the US and Europe. Since then, we’ve been working on the new album in a way I never have before, in regular sessions of a week or two every month. In between, I haven’t let myself listen to rough mixes of the songs.

The result’s been really interesting. Every time we’ve gone back to the record, we’ve been able to approach it with something like fresh ears, and I’ve made large-scale changes and revisions that I never would have considered on our previous records. Some songs have come and gone. Others have suddenly been rescued from the ‘demo’ pile. Some are more or less first-take performances of songs we’d never played at all before that moment; some have been re-tracked from the ground up two or three times.

The good news is that they’ve all come around beautifully and cohesively, and I’m as happy with the record as a whole as I’ve ever been with a SW album. It’s big, it’s bold, and it goes all kinds of places we haven’t been before.

I left Texas three days ago for the last break before the final push, and I’m heading back in a little less than two weeks. We’ll have a lot more information about the record in the next few months, but you can expect that we’ll be touring extensively in 2015. Looking forward to seeing you again soon.

JM/Shearwater