For weeks I have tried to compose an intriguing and articulate synopsis of this album, something digestible and succinct. Ten pages, four restarts, but nothing was landing right. Frankly, it feels impossible to presentationally compress Every Acre into a few neat paragraphs because I’m living through its thick motions and messiness in real-time. Because the truth is: I’m still lost, staggering through the woods somewhere inside it. 

Writing Every Acre was an act of survival and it is the most personal album I’ve made. It is also the most honest. And with all due respect, I want the lyrics to do the talking. That is where I walked intimately with my depression, loss, betrayal, love, impermanence, confusion. The words are where I sorted the pain. Grief doesn’t happen in a straight line – there is no quick elixir, no barometer for progress, no pace to follow – because there is no real finish line. Just forward.

What I will say is it was written in deep quarantine isolation and it presses on the importance of bearing witness, trying to get through one day at a time, doing the best you can with what you have in that moment, with one foot in front of the other. That is how I started to slowly dig below the surface – into ownership, into ancestors, into stewardship, into the delusion of power and last names and property lines. I learned that if I want to see things as they really are, if I am brave enough to accept the truth, I need to engage with the uncomfortable and unknown. Be present. Get tender. Stay curious. Keep compassionate. Choose courage. Invite the suffering to the surface and surrender what I think I need the most. 

When collecting material for this album, I felt an unfamiliar inclination to leave room for unborn ideas, trusting they would reveal themselves in the studio. I came to know a calmness in allocating for emptiness. A large part of my journey to healing has manifested in the depth of my collaboration – with Missy, Luke, Casey, and Daniel; an alchemy for which I am most grateful, and most proud. Together, and together only: we made Every Acre. Sometimes the best way to understand what’s happening around you, what’s shaping inside you, is to get out of your own way. Let go of the need to name it or nurse it into what you think it ought to be. Lean into the chests of those who’ve seen you from all sides already and live in that hold for a while.

If you listen, look closely, it will all show itself to you. Houses have stories – beneath coats of paint, inside chimney flues, rosin fingerprints, cobwebs in corners. The land does too – forgotten trading paths, river stones, buried pits of Ball jars. Throughout Every Acre I said a slow goodbye to all of them. And in the end, even my beloved hound.  

If you ask the full moon for the big love, you will find that new view. Everything might not always dovetail gracefully, or at all, but an unmanufactured life is worth dancing in the shadows for. If you find peace in love’s soft crook, rest inside it as long as you can. And let the clover cover your garden from time to time…sometimes the growing has to happen inside. 

Land is a muse. Time is a teacher. Loss is a mentor. Pain is a healer. Nature is holy. Love is a revelator. 

And some stories are not yours to tell.