The first single from our new album streaming now. "The Bardo."
https://open.spotify.com/album/0nwMp6ir1JYlCdhY1faXUG
If you like it, add it to a playlist or share it. That really does help.
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The silence is always different.
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"(The Bardo) is transitional zone or transitional phase. For example we're in the bardo right now that takes place from birth to death..."
George Saunders said that in a radio interview about his 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. It's a book that really spoke to me, named after a Tibetan concept that (from what I understand) breaks up existence into a string of constant transitions. The book takes place after Abraham Lincoln's real-life son dies, and is buried in a cemetery full of other ghosts who have not yet accepted their own death and moved through to the next phase.
What struck me was that the characters -- ghosts who had not come to terms with dying -- were constantly telling their life stories. They'd repeat the same details, and fixate on their own story and repeat it and repeat it, stuck in this brain loop that refused to release them into whatever came next. I imagined the chorus of people in my life, myself included, repeating our stories and life details and reasserting who we were and filling up every moment of silence with these pre-formed narratives, talking over each other and waiting for our turn to tell our own story. I mean, as a singer of a band, that's exactly what I'm expected do at every show.
When we play The Bardo live, there are 2 prolonged periods of silence. The silence is always different. We played it to a crowd in Boise where the entire restaurant was perfectly silent both times and we all listened to a motorcycle pass down on the street. We've played it in rooms where people get incredibly uncomfortable and won't stop clapping or yelling "woo!". Sometimes people assume that we're waiting for acknowledgment or adulation before breaking the silence. The last show we played was on the baseball diamond on the Wasiw reservation in Dresslerville, NV -- during the final silence the tribal police parked his hayride in front of first base and announced to the children through the police truck loud speaker "Ready....HERE WE GO!" before we started.
And that's been the excitement of this song for me. Instead of the three of us standing above the crowd repeating our own phrases and stories loudly on repeat AT them, we get to take a second and all say nothing together. We get to listen to the things we would have been otherwise drowning out.
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As a band we're in one of those transitional zones now. But I think we're refraining from talking ourselves into a loop. We're letting things unfold, maintaining steady practice, and seeing where listening takes us. After 16 months of work, this new album will be out soon (likely late april/early may) and I believe that embracing the silence, and by extension the transitions, we are floating on into the next thing.
See you soon.
fil/pwb