088: the innocence mission - This Thread Is A Green Street
I don't know too much about the life and times of Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts outside of their work as the innocence mission; the music has always been more than enough. Together, friends since high school, they've been making perfect songs that date back to the mid-1980s, trickling on through the decades and finding a new burst of life over the past few years. Ever inventive and attentive, a golden maturation, honey-ripe with just a hint of sorrow to make it all so much more meaningful.
What I'd like to think is that they make these perfect songs in perfect harmony, in their own time and space, then retreat to nature, to tend to a garden, to watch the world grow around them before quietly wandering back into modernity to release whatever it is they've been cooking up in that time between. The truth is surely something altogether less whimsical but such is the power of their gentle magic you can almost believe such things are possible. You can root for them.
And so here they are, back again in this confounding world, to share another full-length effort, their first in four years. It's called Midwinter Swimmers and features eleven new songs, the first of which, and the album's greeting song, is released this week. Subtly captivating, Karen's voice a dewy fog on a bright morning, it feels both gleaming and like something unearthed, glitter in the soil.
Of the album, Karen says as it's “envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss. And the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects - a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970’s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.”
Midwinter Swimmers is released November 29, via Bella Union. Listen to 'This Thread Is A Green Street' below now.
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