Half Moon Run Speak on Sparkling New Album ‘Salt’.
Written by Marissa Rodriguez
Interview by Sarah Evangelista
Jennifer McCord
Canadian trio Half Moon Run have returned with their new album. Salt is an album that continues to highlight the folk-inspired sound.
Released in March, “You Can Let Go” was their first single of the year. When thinking and talking about it, Devon Portielje, of the band, sings: ‘In the back of my mind was a beautiful, truthful shouting.’
The second single released from the album is “Alco.” This track has a dreamy, soft folk sound that we can almost get lost in. Following this is “Hotel in Memphis” and “Everyone's Moving Out East". The latter has clear folk influences and is a great soundtrack song that we can picture playing in a movie during a scene where the main character is driving away to another place. This song also includes an echoed musical whistle and pace changes, which make it even more perfect for that movie scene.
”9beat” has a catchy, memorable beat and is enhanced by drums and classical instruments like violins and other string instruments. The same goes for a few other songs on this album, but this one feels prominent.
“Dodge the Rubble” has a powerful acoustic guitar and drum-backed beat with violin melodies, and is another anthemic-sounding one that we can picture playing when someone is running or doing something and struggling with lyrics that say ‘It's all I can do and it is wearing me down.’
The rest of the songs including “Heartbeat”, with its pretty harmonies. Then, “Gigafire”, “Goodbye Cali”, “Salt” and “Crawl Back In” follow the same patterns. The album is out now and is available on all streaming platforms!
We got to interview band member Conner Molander about the new album and more.
Do you remember the moment(s) you fell in love with music?
My mother would sing to me (daily, I think) as a very young child. There were songs associated with small activities like brushing teeth, etc. Piano lessons started early, when I was four years old... music has always been woven deeply into the fabric of my life, and I think that goes for the other guys in the band as well.
Salt embodies parts of different albums of yours, and perfectly summons them all. What aspects come into creating a Half Moon Run album?
Since we've been writing together for so many years, we have accumulated a real abundance of musical "raw materials"... riffs, chord sequences, melodies, lyrical fragments, drum beats... Extremely useful stuff, which we can always turn to if the present moment isn't necessarily offering something inspiring directly out of the aether. But on the other hand, we try to stay as open as possible to brand new ideas, which can emerge at any moment. Our most productive/prolific songwriting periods tend to involve a couple of straight months where we don't have a lot of other obligations, during which we can meet up a couple times a week to jam for many hours, often late into the night. In the days in between jams, we try to stay active and healthy, which provides a good counter-balance to the more feral/dionysian nature of jamming together.
Which songs off of the project were the easiest and hardest to create?
"Alco", "Hotel in Memphis", and "9beat" were all very challenging to bring to fruition. All three of those songs have been in development for about a decade. I think it's self-evident why that might be the case - they're quite complex, technically. It took a lot of trial and error to get the arrangements to flow properly. Unlocking the sonic balances of those songs, from a recording perspective, was also very challenging. But challenges are what we need! They're a gift!
None of the songs were particularly "easy", but "Dodge the Rubble" didn't give us much resistance during the recording phase. It's a song we wrote in 2010, and the version on Salt is basically exactly the same as it was back then.
Since you already have a few albums under your belt, how do you know an album is done?
"Art is never finished, only abandoned"... there's real truth in those words from Leonardo da Vinci. But there was a moment, while we were driving together through Oregon, listening to various album pacings in order to determine the order of the songs, where something felt like it "clicked", and we knew we were finished. After that, we drove the rest of our journey in blessed silence.
What came first, the chicken or the egg? (The chicken being the album title, and the egg being the title track of the album).
The egg.
But what really came first was the Sermon on the Mount, where the words "salt of the earth" were spoken to the multitudes assembled there (albeit in Aramaic).
What was so fitting for Salt to be the name of the album? Were there other names that you were debating on?
There were other names floating around, but when Salt was suggested, we never really turned back. We love the elemental simplicity of it, and the paradoxical mysteries associated with its symbolism. It just felt right, what can I say?
Who are your favorite artists/bands at the moment?
In my backpack right now are two books of poetry by W.B. Yeats, who I'm only really discovering now for the first time. I'm in awe... especially his early writings, where he's so earnestly enchanted with Irish folklore... It's truly magical.
Sadly, I don't have any favourite bands at the moment. I think my bandmates have more to say about the contemporary music scene than I do... I don't exactly know how to account for it, and I hope it's not a function of cynicism on my part.