John Moreland

Birds In The Ceiling

John Moreland doesn’t have the answers, and he’s not sure anyone does. But he’s still curious, basking in the comfort of a question, and along the way, those of us listening feel moved to ask our own. “I don’t ever want to sound like I have answers, because I don’t,” he says. “These songs are all questions. Everything I write is just trying to figure stuff out.”
  Moreland is discussing his new album Birds in the Ceiling, a nine-song collection that offers the most comprehensive insight into the thoughts and sounds swimming around in his head to date. A compelling blend of acoustic folk and avant-garde pop playfulness, Birds in the Ceiling lives confidently in a space of its own, enriched by tradition but never encumbered by it. The songwriting that has stunned fans and critics alike since 2015’s High on Tulsa Heat remains
potent, while the sonic evolution that unfolds on the record feels like a natural expansion of 2020’s acclaimed LP5.

 The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Fresh Air, Paste, GQ, and others have embraced Moreland’s meditative songs, while performances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS This Morning, NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and more have introduced Moreland to millions. And yet, while the Tulsa-based Moreland is grateful for the respect and musical conversation he’s now having with people around the world, he is also more focused on the idea of just talking to one person– –or even himself. “Through the years, I’ve felt like I’m increasingly talking to myself in my songs,
more and more,” he says. “Maybe in the past, I wasn’t aware of it, but now, I am. I think doing that has helped me be less hard on myself, which makes you more generous and compassionate in
general.”

That helps explain why even if Moreland is reaching out to someone else, there is no judgment. “I’m in the same boat with whoever I’m talking to,” Moreland says. Moreland’s songs do feel intimate––like overheard conversations or solitary meditations. “I want to talk one-on-one to someone in a song,” he says. “I don’t want to address a group, really, because I think that’s when it’s easy to start pontificating––and it gets less honest.” On Birds in the Ceiling, Moreland’s singing contributes to the feelings of hushed intimacy. Wielding a warm, sandpaper soul voice, Moreland got used to singing loudly as he began playing in bars, fighting to be heard over chattering crowds. “When I first started singing, I was very selfconscious about it,” he says. “I think I tried to affect my voice more. Singing loud could be a security blanket sometimes. On the new album, on a lot of the songs I was definitely making a conscious effort to sing quieter––almost whisper.”

Produced by Matt Pence and Moreland, Birds in the Ceiling is dynamic: a folk record that refuses to stay in its lane. It’s the second album for Pence with Moreland, who sees the former––a Denton, Texas-based engineer, producer, and drummer––as an ideal musical partner. “We have a lot of the same influences, and I have been really influenced by his bands,” Moreland says. “It feels really effortless.

Christopher Paul Stelling

Even before 2020 slid historically off the rails, Christopher Paul Stelling confronted an essential exercise in acceptance and gratitude. In December 2019, Stelling started another cross country sprint from California to Florida, where the songwriter who has long called western North Carolina home was raised. Aside from recording his fifth album, Best of Luck, he had toured much of that year, making relentless laps around North America. He wanted to make it home not only for Christmas but also to see Emma, his 92 year old grandmother. He didnt; she passed just days before he arrived. Recorded alone in her modest white ranch house in Daytona Beach, Forgiving It All, Stellings wisest, most intimate, and most settled record yet, and his first self released LP in eight years, feels like a final tribute to her and to everything he and we have lost or gained.

Committed to tape in Emmas home a year after Stelling cut his intended never ending tour short, the songs on Forgiving It All are the lessons of a once wild kid looking at (not quite) 40, expressing acceptance for the struggles and joys of life and singing out his gratitude for still being here. Opener Die To Know is a tender ode to innocence, a remembrance of simple joy and sincerity before experience and age dulled our enthusiasms. Wildfire, which moves with the ineffable grace of ripples on some idyllic pond, stares down accreted adult fears and begs for the mercy of rebirth. WWYLLYD presents an exercise in radical empathy, apt for our universally troubled times. The title is an acronym for When What You Love Lets You Down. Were all starving artists, it suggests, but thats what keeps us going, interested, and, if were lucky, alive.

We will wrestle for our lifetimes with what happened in 2020 and what may follow. Forgiving It All is an instinctual and honest response to trying to make the best of it: sorting through the past and using the present to prepare for an unwritten future. These songs remind us were lucky to be here, no matter what or who it is we have to forgive.