Watchhouse - Watchhouse - CD DIGISLEEVE

By the time 2019 came to its fitful end, Andrew Marlin knew he was tired of touring. He was grateful, of course, for the ascendancy of Mandolin Orange, the duo he’d cofounded in North Carolina with fiddler Emily Frantz exactly a decade earlier. With time, they had become new flagbearers of the contemporary folk world, sweetly singing soft songs about the hardest parts of our lives, both as people and as a people. Their rise—particularly crowds that grew first to fill small dives, then the Ryman, then amphitheaters the size of Red Rocks— humbled Emily and Andrew, who became parents to Ruby late in 2018. They’d made a life of this. Still, every night, Andrew especially was paid to relive a lifetime of grievances and griefs onstage. After 2019’s Tides of a Teardrop, a tender accounting of his mother’s early death, the process became evermore arduous, even exhausting. Soundcheck, at least, provided some relief, as the band worked through a batch of guarded but hopeful songs written just after Ruby’s birth. Those tunes are now Nightbird, less Mandolin Orange’s sixth album and more their seamless reinvention as a band at the regenerative edges of subtly experimental folk-rock. Challenging as they are charming, and an inspired search for personal and political goodness, these nine songs offer welcome lessons about what any of us might become when the night begins to break. When 2020 dawned, Emily and Andrew hatched a plan to break their cycle: For the first time, they’d leave Ruby with Emily’s mom and escape with their longtime bandmates to a cabin on the edge of Smith Mountain Lake, a sprawling hideaway at the foot of the Appalachians. Also for the first time, after a decade of Andrew engineering and producing most everything Mandolin Orange made, they’d bring help—Josh Kaufman, the producer and multi-instrumentalist who had wowed them with his work alongside the likes of The National and his trio Bonny Light Horseman. There were no expectations. This was simply a full-band retreat with a new friend and co-producer, working together in the refulgent sunshine of grand lakeside windows. Almost immediately, they realized this wasn’t some audition; they were making Nightbird. On the first day, Kaufman told Emily and Andrew to imagine this were Mandolin Orange’s first record and to realize that conceptions of how they had worked, recorded, or even sounded belonged only in the past. In a way, Andrew had new permission and space to lean into his vision for what Mandolin Orange might become. “Andrew is so confident in what he wants to hear, so full of ideas. Even beyond what we’d worked out together on tour with these songs, he knew what he wanted,” Emily says. “Having Josh in the studio meant Andrew didn’t have to bear the whole weight of getting there.” Alongside drummer Joe Westerlund, guitarist Josh Oliver, and bassist Clint Mullican, Andrew and Emily indulged novel structures and textures. “Better Way,” a kind-hearted meditation on online meanness, shifts slowly from a bluegrass trot into a spectral marvel before an immersive acoustic drone frames a new future. The gentle harmonies of “Belly of the Beast” eventually turn into a tangle above baying strings, Andrew and Emily guiding each other through the shared perils of whatever comes next. These songs, after all, started with a fundamental shift in Emily and Andrew’s life. In the first few months after Ruby’s birth, they split the day into shifts: Emily minded Ruby during the waking hours, while Andrew sat beside Ruby all night, watching their firstborn sleep as he quietly strummed strings. In those wee hours, he allowed his writing to wander, capturing the uncanny sense of wonder and intrigue that pervades the darkest parts of night. “If I didn’t have Ruby in my hands, I had an instrument in them,” remembers Andrew. “And watching Ruby sleep, being surrounded by that mystery at night, led to a feeling of magical realism in these songs. I used melodies and ideas I’d never use.” Long-lost relatives, for instance, gather with him around the crib in communion during “Lonely Love Affair,” mentoring him through this staggering upheaval. He expresses the fears of a new father, alleviated by the possibility and goodness he sees in his sleeping baby. These songs allowed Mandolin Orange to take the chance Josh Kaufman (co-producer) proposed because they’re about the value of doing exactly that, of trusting in grand acts borne of personal uncertainty. It will be tempting to summarize Nightbird as Mandolin Orange’s inevitable parenthood record, or maybe the one where they got a little strange. It is, instead, a record about growing up without growing old, about experiencing the world and letting it change you, whether through the mystery of a newborn or the vagaries of improvising or the comforts of familiar and wondrous love. Nightbird is Mandolin Orange’s perfectly rendered link between their longtime allure and an unwritten future, one that’s only as hopeful as we can imagine it might be.