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 SHEARWATER, the atmospheric rock band fronted by Texan JONATHAN MEIBURG, have produced one of 2008’s essential releases in ROOK, a beautifully orchestrated and brooding album employing imagery of the natural world to startling effect. CHRIS HARMS quizzes the erstwhile ornithologist about change, creation and, unsurprisingly, birds.
In 2006 Shearwater released Palo Santo, the band’s fourth album, and first without a significant contribution from Will Sheff, who formed the band in 1999 with Okkervil River bandmate Jonathan Meiburg. Palo Santo represented Shearwater’s evolution to become Meiburg’s main project, the widely travelled ornithologist and songwriter filling the album with stark and evocative songs, many of which were written on a lonely field trip in the Galapagos.
This year sees the release of Rook, Shearwater’s first all-new album on respected US label Matador, and by far the band’s most cohesive and affecting effort. Meiburg’s voice effortlessly shifts from whispered croon to banshee howl as he sings of hunted creatures (Leviathan, Bound), environmental upheaval (Rooks), and the dark causeways of history itself (Century Eyes), all while his co-musicians Kim Burke (Meiburg’s ex-wife), Howard Draper and Thor Harris weave dramatic backdrops from multiple instruments for the haunting lyrics.
It may come as a surprise then that Meiburg is one the most grounded, polite and unaffected musicians of his type. In fact, it sometimes seems he’d much rather be talking about birds and nature than anything involving the awkward mechanics of releasing an album. Perhaps it’s this understated, non-egocentric approach that saw Rook quickly established as a critical favourite with only a moderate amount of wider recognition. However, that may already be changing, assisted by the securing of a coveted US tour support slot for a little band called Coldplay…
“We were a little bowled over by that,” says Meiburg down the line from Austin. “A lot of it had to do with our manager Ben Goldberg who is friends with Coldplay’s manager … But on the other hand there were a lot of other people who were trying to get on that bill. Apparently they just heard our record and liked it.”
I ask if it’s the largest audience Shearwater will have played to. “Oh heavens yes,” says Meiburg, endearingly betraying a future filled with tweed and elbow patches. “On the last show of the last tour I played to about 50 people in Texas, and the next show will be for about 15,000 people in Los Angeles.” At least he knows how to deal with the greater numbers… “I kind of get scared playing for fifteen people, I get scared played for fifty… (laughs) … I’m nearsighted so I ‘m going to take my glasses off and, metaphorically speaking, keep my head down, get through the set and try to enjoy it.”
Like Palo Santo, Rook was born from one of Meiburg’s scientific excursions into remote bird habitats, this time the Falklands, researching Karakaras, or ‘Johnny Rooks’ as they are commonly known*. “That was the trip where I really started thinking about the sort of musical and lyrical themes that showed up on the record,” say Meiburg. “And then I kept on hacking away at it once I got home, for the better part of a year.”
The themes he refers to are often apocalyptic in their imagery, but Meiburg doesn’t agree that the lyrics are wilfully dark, instead viewing them as an attempt to re-capture moments of strong emotion. “The experiences that stick with you the most strongly are the few moments in your life where you feel like everything adds up and you get this sort of gestalt,” he explains. “You know – an overwhelming sensory impression of an experience or presence that you feel. I think in a lot of ways music is an attempt to call those moments back and conjure them back up again.”
This notion of momentary intensity is reflected in the songs themselves, each piece grand in arrangement, but often unexpectedly (and in an odd way, refreshingly) brief. Meiburg explains, “What I really wanted on this record was to not necessarily have any idea of how long a song was going to go on, or where it was going … it might stop suddenly, or it might drift. It was what the songs themselves wanted…”
Once you’ve heard Rook, it’s not hard to see why Chris Martin picked Shearwater as a support (although cynics might say it’s dangerous to open with a band more interesting and less self-indulgent than yours). Happily for Meiburg the opening slots will allow Shearwater greater opportunities to travel further, simultaneously allowing him to do more bird-watching and possibly allow him to return to Australia, where as a student he visited indigenous communities in the far north. I ask him what he would like to see and do if the band gets to tour. “My dream is to play the last show of the tour in Hobart and have everybody do the Overland Track,” he says with sincerity, revealing once again the naturalist at the heart of the musician. “I would dearly, dearly love for that to happen … It just seems stupid to go all the way around the world to this fantastic place full of all these wonders and spend all of it in the middle of the city.”
ROOK is out now through Matador/Remote Control. Visit www.shearwatermusic.com and www.matadorrecords.com/shearwater for videos of Jonathan’s excursion to the Falklands.
*Jonathan Meiburg on the Johnny Rook: “It’s a little confusing because Karakara’s aren’t Rooks. Rooks are your Asian crow relatives that are familiar if you live in Britain or Northern Europe. The Northern Europeans that showed up in the Falklands, these birds kind of reminded them vaguely of Rooks so they called them Johnny Rooks. But they’re not related. Taxonomically they’re actually falcons.” So now you know.
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