The Barrowdowns are just a couple weeks away from releasing their first full album, but in the meantime they’re hoping to trade earworms for coins. Open thyne hearts and thyne coffers and feast yee ears upon the glory of ‘Mockingbird’.
It’s amazing, given how much we’ve heard from The Barrowdowns, that for the last couple of years they’ve been toting around their debut three-point-five-song self-titled EP. While we might not be getting tired of hearing ‘Landlocked’ any time soon (it did make our list of Best Songs of 2016) it’s time to supplement the catalogue.
And so, The Barrowdowns, in their wisdom, have returned to the studio so that they might give us the gift of fresh music (though, it’s not really a gift, support your musicians, okay?). The past couple months they’ve been working towards the inevitable: ‘Come What May Come’, an 11-track album that showcases their transition from a folk band into a progressive folk band. We’re trying to imagine Natalie McMaster fronting Rush, never mind the inaccuracy of that comparison.
“I suppose is a reflection of what we have been steering toward since we released the EP. We started out as a really mellow acoustic folk band and very quickly started delving into the fuller, heavier (and sometimes darker) sound,” says TBD’s Rowan Walker who penned the single.
Walker explains that the song is one he crafted almost ten years ago, but it’s experienced a handful of iterations since then. The song essentially became a passion project for Walker who says the crux of it was about learning to live with his demons.
“Lyrically, (like a lot of the songs off the album) Mockingbird is about struggles with mental health. At the risk of sounding cliché, music has always been a means of processing some of my darker moments. I first started writing ‘Mockingbird’ at a particularly low point and the song deals a lot with feelings of helplessness, and the attempts to fight back against certain toxic internal dialogues I think a lot of people deal with. As the song progresses the lyrics shift to a sense of acceptance of these dialogues as just another part of who we are. Something we can hopefully challenge and learn to live with.”
The band are hoping that the single will provide enough of a tease to encourage fans to support the recording of the new album with their crowdfunding campaign, lest multi-instrumentalist Dave Fultz turn to a life of acting instead.
The album will be released on Friday, May 19th, 2017 at a show at Halifax’s Seahorse Tavern that will also feature fellow Halifax bands The Brood and The Drug Rugs. The band have plans to tour the album through the summer and well into the fall.