VALLEY MAKER 'WHEN THE DAY LEAVES' OUT NOW VIA FRENCHKISS RECORDS. SHARES NEW SINGLE “BRANCH I BEND.”
Valley Maker (Austin Crane) has released his fourth studio album, When the Day Leaves, out today February 19 via Frenchkiss Records. The pandemic has seen us all become experts in the imbalance of uncertainty these days, newly accustomed to canceling plans and tentatively rescheduling them for some future we can only imagine. For Crane - a ruminative songwriter, riveting guitarist, and singular voice - such a sense of uncertainty has emerged as his steadfast companion these last few years, a period of profound transition. It’s prompted him to appreciate the present even as he analyzes it, to acknowledge the future’s limitless possibilities even as he recognizes its potential perils. This flux is the anchor for When the Day Leaves. Through his compelling accounting of the past and his reckoning with this moment, Crane stares down the “part of life that remains unknown.” Stream/purchase When the Day Leaves HERE.
Today Valley Maker also shares a new single off the album, “Branch I Bend,” which premiered yesterday via KEXP. Of the track he notes, “‘Branch I Bend is the opening track on the new record, and is a song about time. I wrote it as a meditation on how we make sense of the passing of time – both within our individual existence and in relation to others. The song is very cyclical in nature, so we wanted the production elements on the track to unfold in conversation with the song’s lyrical progression. I love Morgan Henderson’s woodwinds on this track, which together with Amy Godwin’s vocals create a lush environment for entering into the world of the record. The line “the branch I bend, I do not break” is inspired by a James Wright poem and speaks to a will to carry on despite the weight of time, and to the importance of resting in moments of beauty and connection. While the song was written prior to the pandemic, it feels connected to how strangely time is moving these days, and to the different places that can take our minds.
They share, “[on “Branch I Bend”] The opening lyrics, ‘Hold on, day, don’t cut me loose’ set the thematic tone for Valley Maker’s gorgeously ruminative fourth record.” Crane spoke with KEXP’s Jasmine Albertson about When The Day Leaves - read the Q&A here.
LISTEN/PURCHASE “BRANCH I BEND”
Watch Austin perform the song filmed by dustoftheground here:
Paste included When The Day Leaves in their “most anticipated release of 2021” list and American Songwriter chatted with Austin about the making of the LP - read the Q&A here.
"Crane has teased the album with arresting singles like ‘No One Is Missing’ and “Instrument,” muscular songs that ripple with rich acoustic textures and goosebump-inducing backing vocals from Amy Godwin." AV Club
"It’s a calming, folky rumination about shifting sands, and much like his previous work, 'Mockingbird”'thrives on Crave’s intuitive vocal cadence, subtly accenting words to draw the most passion out of his songs." Paste
“a tender portrait of perseverance, an ode to carrying on.” Clash on “Instrument”
"atmospheric rural folk rock." American Songwriter on “No One Is Missing”
“Quavering vocal harmonies and delicate acoustic accents roll through a blissful backcountry scene” The Line Of Best Fit on “No One Is Missing”
"The single incorporates soft acoustic guitars to create a flowing tone through the intro, soft hums floating through the track." MXDWN on “No One Is Missing”
"Crane’s lingering vocals and gentle guitar work create a tone that is nostalgic and meditative...This raw track is deeply beautiful, encouraging its listener to take solace in the fact that no matter what, they are always in motion." Wild Honey Pie on “Mockingbird”
"the man behind Valley Maker, has the rhythmic sensibilities and distinctive vocals reminiscent of Kurt Vile." Speak Into My Good Eye
"Crane’s nimble fingerpicking, fleshed out by Amy Godwin’s celestial backing vocals, carry the ghostly, windswept track across six minutes that explore themes familiar to Valley Maker: memory, nature, the passage of time." AV Club on “Mockingbird”
"The track is a smart and heartfelt piece of folk storytelling, that feels rich, vivid, and full of a sense of place and atmosphere." We All Want Someone To Shout For on “Mockingbird”
"Songwriter Austin Crane revives his beloved brand of atmospheric folk and perspicacious modern gospel that reflects on settling back into an old, familiar space and community."
New Commute on “Mockingbird”
"From the heavenly backing vocals to the steady strums of the guitar, ‘No One Is Missing’ there’s a grounding to track that is hearty yet pensive." Abduction Radiation
"The raw ambience of the track offers a calm and refreshing sonic breeze."
Aupium on “No One Is Missing”
Photo by Bree Burchfield.
We have all become experts in the imbalance of uncertainty these days, newly accustomed to canceling plans and tentatively rescheduling them for some future we can only imagine. For Austin Crane—the ruminative songwriter, riveting guitarist, and singular voice performing and collaborating as Valley Maker for more than a decade now—such a sense of uncertainty has emerged as his steadfast companion these last few years, a period of profound transition. It’s prompted him to appreciate the present even as he analyzes it, to acknowledge the future’s limitless possibilities even as he recognizes its potential perils. This flux is the anchor for Crane’s fourth and best album as Valley Maker, the gorgeous and felicitous When the Day Leaves. Through his compelling accounting of the past and his reckoning with this moment, Crane stares down the “part of life that remains unknown.”
Early in 2019, Crane and his wife, Megan, decided it was time to leave Seattle. South Carolina natives, they’d been in Seattle for the better part of a decade while he pursued a doctorate in human geography at the University of Washington, and she worked as a midwife. As family members got older and longtime friends started relocating back to the Carolinas, they were confined to a cramped apartment in an expensive, distant city. When Megan found a job at a hospital in Columbia, their college town, they took a whirlwind house-hunting trip and found an affordable little home in need of big love. As Summer 2019 ended, they prepared to head east and rejoin a deep community of friends, settling in a city undergoing a welcome renaissance.
Still, major questions loomed: Would they, just then past 30, like it enough to stay, to start a new life? And what did it mean to go home? How would it feel, especially now, to leave the socially and politically comfortable hub of Seattle for a Southern city marked by enduring economic and racial divides, where the granite sides of the State Capitol remain pocked by Sherman’s cannons? And what would it be like to restore a century-old home so overgrown it had become a neighborhood punchline, to plant new roots in a place some had written off?
These quandaries frame When the Day Leaves, Crane’s self-portrait of his own worries and dreams, desires and regrets, ideals and anxieties. In having finally found home, Crane seems also to have found a way to reflect our age of immense uncertainty. Written just before and after the couple’s cross-country trek, these 11 songs ponder what will become of the world and of Crane himself. Driven as it is by departure, When the Day Leaves marks the arrival of Valley Maker as a trustworthy narrator for these shaky times.
Crane synthesizes these complex feelings into the magnetic first single, “No One Is Missing.” A song about reckoning with self-doubt while searching for community, “No One Is Missing” acknowledges the tension inherent in those ideas, especially during our polarized times. You’ll find yourself singing along to these blues about the search for solidarity, comforted by them. “Voice Inside the Well” is a ringer for Kurt Vile’s insouciance, but Crane draws a crooked line between the 2017 Las Vegas massacre and his own shortcomings, ruminating on our collective struggle to temper “the rage inside the overheating.” The swaying “Branch I Bend” is a workaday anthem and an ode to whatever goodness you find, to recognizing grace in a world that can seem starved for it.
All these thoughts are rendered with newfound lyrical richness. Crane feels like a burgeoning poet here, able to balance intimate tidbits with universal ambiguity in songs that foster intrigue. He raises questions only to let them linger, shaping clouds of geographical and political signifiers and asking you to draw out the meaning. During “Mockingbird,” he sings of moving to his Columbia home and planting a new tree, tiny details that induce an imaginative diorama for the listener—where does life go from here? During the luxuriant blues waltz “Aberration,” he turns questions about the unease that upends our sleep into a modern Whitman credo for pressing on. “Alive, alive/Try to begin/Again, arrive,” he sings, his longtime harmonizing partner Amy Godwin offering up perfect reassurance. These elliptical narratives, along with the album’s sublime if understated production and thoughtful structures, often recall Gillian Welch and Arthur Russell, twin touchstones for Crane.
For Valley Maker’s earlier albums, Crane recorded in fits and starts, tracking only when the exigencies of graduate school, tours, finances, and life at large allowed. But in the months before recording began this time, he convened with producer Trevor Spencer and Godwin for sessions in Portland and Seattle, teasing out the album’s interwoven arrangements and meticulous vocal harmonies. Then, in November 2019, Crane decamped from Columbia to the Pacific Northwest for a three-week session in the woods outside of Woodinville, a small town northeast of Seattle at the foot of the Cascades. He stayed in the loft of Spencer’s Way Out Studio, the two sealing themselves off in a horse barn-turned-recording room like kids at summer camp, just as winter’s mist closed in.
They recorded nearly all of When the Day Leaves during their studio sequestration, putting together the finger-picked acoustic bones of the songs themselves. A small community of collaborators drifted in and out, adding imaginative accents—the horns and winds that seem to lift Crane’s spirits during “No One Is Missing,” the violin that galvanizes the edge of “On a Revelation,” the drums that shape “Pine Trees” like a series of rolling peaks and valleys.
The time commitment is a crucial component of When the Day Leaves. These arrangements are intricate and elegant, little troves of detail in which you might discover, say, a newly bent guitar string or another of Godwin’s spectral harmonies on your twelfth listen. What’s more, these eleven songs snap together like puzzle pieces, so that the scene you step into with the first notes of opener “Branch I Bend” is the same one you exit when the glowing organs of closer “When the Day Leaves” go dark. For 46 minutes, you feel like you’re sitting with Crane in a unified sound-world of his design; he offloads his observations about our tangled thicket of hope and fear, aspiration and exasperation.
When the Day Leaves is an uninterrupted sequence of reflections about the generational limbo of being awed by and worried for this world. The anxiety of uncertainty—always part of life but now seemingly omnipresent—can be vexing, a reality these songs acknowledge. Crane, as he sings at one point, is fully “aligned with my blues.” But these songs also affirm that life is an endless opportunity for renewal, for trying again. As with dusk, when the day leaves and “tries to start again” amid a riot of expiring colors, we eventually learn what comes next.
Valley Maker When The Day Leaves tracklisting
Branch I Bend
No One Is Missing
Pine Trees
Instrument
Mockingbird
Aberration
Voice Inside The Well
On A Revelation
Freedom
Line Erasing
When The Day Leaves
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Lisa Gottheil - lisag@grandstandhq.com