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Words: Hannah Gregory
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As Shearwater, Jonathan Meiburg lets his imagination take flight, shaping music that evokes nature in all its precarious fragility
Let’s begin at the end.
As we draw to the interview’s close, I ask Jonathan Meiburg – founder member of Okkervil River, touring member of Bill Callahan’s band, and the creative heart behind Shearwater – if there’s anything he wants to add, anything that might be missing. “I wanted to try to conjure a sort of other world,” he offers. “I wanted there to be a wholeness, which wraps you, takes you somewhere else.”
It’s a good description of Rooks, Shearwater’s fifth album, and their second to be released on Matador. Rooks is the sort of song-cycle to play when you haven’t a log fire to warm you, when you feel without abode on your own threshold, and need to feel at home in the world, in some way. It fades to the glint of ‘The Hunter’s Star’, the beacon we’ve been chasing through a drama of country scenes, dotted cottage lights on dark hillsides; following a voice that swells and soars, shelters in nooks and nests, grows wings and claws. Winged metaphors abound; and shearwaters, I’ve learnt, are long-winged seabirds, most common in temperate waters and nocturnal at their coastal breeding sites, where they prefer moonless nights.
Shearwater came into being back in 2001 as a sort of side project to Okkervil River, a place where Meiburg and fellow Okkervil founder Will Sheff could give their quieter creations space to breathe. Over time, though, Shearwater has grown into a shifting ensemble through which Meiburg explores his nature-obsessed visions. Part-time ornithologist, he sometimes dreams in birds, strange and maudlin, creatures you’d always believed to exist but had never actually heard sing. He uses the word ‘maudlin’ often. Nature seems to define him.
“There are these little pockets of places where you see what nature used to be like, and when you visit them, you have this tremendous sense of absolute loss. Most people don’t have experience of nature in their everyday lives; it becomes very hard to identify with, or even to know that it’s disappearing. There’s a sadness in this, that I guess I’m trying to wrestle with, until you reach some kind of peace.”
‘Write like a human’ was the note Meiburg wrote to himself as he set about Rooks. He’s not sure if his songs can be considered mini-epics, but he intends them to swirl in layers, “like looking into a deep clear pool” – one whose bottom is far away but seems touchable, close. Despite stringed peaks and woodwind dips, this is not what Meiburg archly refers to as “victory rock”, where the listener feels like they’re being hammered over the head with every instrument’s force at once. Instead, Shearwater’s music feels contoured, curved, shaped. “Michelangelo supposedly said that sculpture was easy,” says Meiburg, “You just remove all the unnecessary stone.”
Do you have the same approach to songwriting?
“Well that’s what it feels like. You just keep chipping away at this thing until finally, if you removed anything else, it would topple over.”
Some things that inspire Shearwater: documentaries about chasing sharks, books about snow leopards, primitive recordings captured on early microphones, such as the Secret Museum Of Mankind volumes on Yazoo Records. Some thoughts Shearwater inspire in me: Percy Shelley stranding himself in the middle of a lake, Romantic poets bringing the wild to the cultivated page, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above
A Sea Of Mist, where a lone cloaked figure overlooks a ragged landscape: man battling against, or in harmony with, nature. I suggest to Meiburg that there’s something very masculine to this idea, of the explorer set against the elements, but he contends with such idealised views of nature. “You don’t want to romanticise the natural world beyond what it barely is, because then you’re just projecting your own fantasy,” he contends. “The writer Alistair Grant compares National Parks to graveyards and prisons. But the hunter, it’s what we are. There’s no changing it. We just eat and eat and eat.”
It seems a silly thing to say to a singer, that they know how to express with their voice. But there’s an un-rock element to Meiburg’s voice, which seeks to find new ways of expression – like Mark Hollis’ late solo notes, when he was so at peace he could fade into silence, or Tim Buckley’s searching debut. Shearwater’s last album Palo Santo, first released on Misra in 2006 and reissued last year on Matador, was loosely centred on the life of Nico: her otherworldliness suited a score that scaled phantom cliffs, slept fitfully, dreamt bewilderedly, and remains difficult to precis beyond analogies with the natural world. Meiburg says there’s more of himself on this record, but in his personal universe, music and nature are everything. “The things we most fear are going to happen. The permanence that we long for isn’t there. There’s a way of approaching this that makes things seem less dreadful. You can catch little glimpses of this feeling through music, which transports you instantly, makes things that you’ve never experienced before suddenly seem familiar. There’s some joy in this, some redemption. For a little while, yes, you can cheat time, and death.” |
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