New York – “Get these rocks out of my mouth,” Chris Porterfield pleads on “Wings,” a brand new song off of Field Report’s forthcoming Marigolden, which premiers today. This line echoes a theme that runs throughout much of the new album — Porterfield’s complicated relationship with alcohol, sobriety, and reflection on his new life as a touring musician. It’s a starkly minimal track, stripped down to the bare essentials, so what stands out most are Porterfield’s eloquent, literate lyrics: “love melts my wings and the / emptiness / of space / smells like paraffin and gasoline and / color coded cash and coins / the currency of dreams.”
“The body remembers what the mind forgets,” Chris Porterfield reminisces on his acclaimed band Field Report’s sophomore record, Marigolden. The record is strewn with references to the inevitable tolls taken by the passage of time, and prolonged distance from home and loved ones.
The past couple of years have flashed by for Porterfield, who was thrust into the spotlight after years of musical reclusion. His Milwaukee-based band, Field Report (an anagram of his surname), was culled together in the studio while recording their 2012 self-titled debut. They suddenly found themselves championed by their former idols: offered support tours by Counting Crows and Aimee Mann, lauded by the likes of Mark Eitzel and Richard Thompson, and covered by Blind Boys Of Alabama.
The album runs the musical gamut, from the Traveling Wilburys-esque pop of “Home,” to the Neil Young-inspired piano ballad “Ambrosia,” to the electronic sonic landscape of “Wings.” While the compositions express a wide range in terms of genre, they find unity in themselves within the limits of self-imposed minimalism. In the studio, the songs were stripped down to the bones and built back up using only their essential elements.
Sequestered in a seemingly never-ending Ontario blizzard, the band only broke from this musical process to add logs to the stove, with the snow and the fire providing a proper background for music so rooted in the elemental. The effect that this fundamentals-based approach achieves is universal: the sparse arrangements and common themes speak to everyone, but somehow feel tailored to each listener. The title itself reflects this, a portmanteau of two common images (marigold and golden) to create something that feels both idiosyncratic and familiar: Marigolden.
Marigolden will be released on October 7th by Partisan Records
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