Field Notes is coming May 7th 2020
Hah! In the mountains. ON the mountains. “And behind it all…everything a mountain can mean” as Ali Smith wrote in the novel Spring.
The mountain above my house is called Slide Mountain. It’s one of those rare magnificent peaks not named after some dude. It’s named after a thing it did. On the south eastern face, there is no south eastern face. It just slid down into the valley, into the field below. Mark Twain wrote a story about it, saying that he witnessed an argument and was asked to settle it. Since Rancher 1 owned the land that slid down on top of Rancher 2’s ranch, Rancher 1 said he owned everywhere his dirt now covered, including Rancher 2’s house. Twain didn’t know that a.) it was a joke until later and b.) that it was all a big joke, owning land at all. hah!
Erosion is a natural process, but it can be sped up. And one of the fastest ways is us humans. Before European contact and colonization of Wašiw and Paiute land, Lake Tahoe was surrounded by ancient forests. As the new-comers dug out the mountains in search of silver, they relocated those forests, in the form of lumber, into the mountains they’d hollowed out, to keep them from collapsing. Eventually the silver was gone, and all of the old-growth forests were gone, from the shore of the lake to Reno. Today, Lake Tahoe is a very popular tourist destination with many brochures about it.
People with Bodies second full length album is called Field Notes. (guitarist/songwriter) Emily Pratt sings in the fourth and fifth song of the album, “What’s that dead in America?….What’s that buried in America?….It’s my Corpse” followed by the song Ode To Mountains. “They were here before I was born. They’ll be here long after I’m gone.”
We recorded Field Notes in a cabin just south of Yosemite National Park. The park was closed because of the government shutdown and we were not allowed in. On new years eve, 2018, we recorded the guitar tracks in a small wood shed at the time owned by (drummer/songwriter) Fil Corbitt’s dad. A huge pine swayed above us, dead from beetle infestation. Effects of the California droughts. While we recorded “The Bardo” a huge crash echoed through the hollow. The neighbor’s barn had been crushed.
John Muir wrote of a storm in these same hills. When he was one of the first white people here, the trees didn’t snap much. He wanted to feel the storm so badly that he climbed to the very top of a pine tree and held on for dear life. Rain and wind whipping him around, the tree bucking and swaying like an unbroken horse, he felt what it was like to be in the top of a tree during a storm. The final song on the album is called Crow Brain. It’s written from the point of view of a crow in the top branch of a tree, collecting objects.
Field Notes is also a collection. Mostly made of little bits of phrases and drumbeats and interesting sounds like the zipper or steel drum or symphonizer you can hear (bassist/bartender) Mark Nesbitt play in the final track. From the pile, we’ve fashioned a sort of garbage shrine to the world we live in. If our last album Con Cuerpo was about having a body, this one is about having an environment for that body. The season changed six times while we made this record. It comes out May 7th, 2020.
As a band, People with Bodies tries to embrace the transitory. To let things evolve, manifest and pass. We’ve had 6 band plants that have travelled and recorded with us, most dying of exposure in the tour van - a constant reminder that everything is mortal and that we as people with bodies and cars often factor into that mortality, or bring it more swiftly. We try to embrace the shifts in genre — this album pretty different from the last, and from gender — Emily came out as trans and Fil as non-binary during the process of this record, and from instrument — each band member plays about a dozen instruments on this album…but an unbreakable thread of consistency is the world around us. After all, as author Mike Branch said on our first EP, “we are all just bodies in an environment.”
Back at the foot of slide mountain I am kneeling by the creek with a metal bottle. During quarantine we are growing a new band plant from seeds. They are Aspen trees. I figure this creek water works very well on the naturally occurring grove here so maybe the water has some Aspen-pleasing qualities. When I stand to walk back home the last bit of light is touching the top of the mountain and it’s bright purple and the sky is pink behind it.