Behind the Music

The inaugural thesis for “Bright Morning Stars” was to create an album composed entirely of traditional material. This practical limitation was seeded by an annoyance: our online music distributor has a scheme that makes licensing cover songs unduly expensive for artists. Our decision to focus on traditionals opened up a process more profound than we could have anticipated. 

We began gathering songs wherever we could find them—from friends and folk jams, from old songbooks and traditional music archives. The songs we were uncovering led us across centuries and continents: old-world ballads from the 16th century, American cowboy and railroad songs, Appalachian folk hymns, World War I anthems—all songs held in the public trust of the collective unconscious.

It quickly became an alchemical research project. We wanted to know the history and lineage of each tune—how they had changed over time and what the various bards and songkeepers of days-gone-by had done with them. We weren't interested in simply reproducing any one historical version. Our arrangements are composites, assembled from the many different versions, melodies and verses that have accumulated around each song over time. Folk songs are living, breathing and dynamic—not quaint and inert artifacts of an imagined past. 

Behind all of this was a foundational commitment to the tactile, the rooted, and the human—this guided the rest of the process, from recording and final production, to the album art, a woodblock print that we carved by hand. 

We recorded “Bright Morning Stars” on the Winter Solstice with our dear friends and musical compatriots Andy Beargie (Percussion, Audio Engineer), Peter Doyle (Mandolin), Nicholas Harley (Lead Guitar, Harmonica) and Ryan Heimlich (Banjo, Vocals). Our goal was to create an album that evoked the sense of friends playing music in a room together—which is precisely what happened on December 21, 2025 at Echo Park Studios in Bloomington, Indiana. It was recorded almost entirely live (with the exception of a handful of overdubs) straight onto two inch reel-to-reel tape. None of the tracks, including vocals, are isolated from the others. Rather than rely on endless takes and overdubs, we wanted the limitations and beautiful imperfections of an analog process to lead the way. 

We submit this record as our own small contribution to the growing movement of people responding to vacuity of our increasingly digital lives by reinvesting in the physical realm: making things by hand, remembering forgotten traditions, attending to our locality, gathering for meals together, practicing reciprocity with the species with which we share our bioregions. 

Folk music traditions are the music of the people—”the folk.” Every song on this record has survived through the centuries because countless ordinary people decided that they were worth remembering and passing along to the next generation. We believe that folk music offers some kind of ancient medicine for the fatalism of our times. Not because it offers simple reassurance or tidy moral lessons. Rather, the ancient melodies and archetypes can situate our lives within a broader human story. They widen the aperture. They ennoble the ordinary. They teach us that the lives of people who history has forgotten are worthy of song.