Writing in the liner notes of This is Just a Place, the forthcoming album from Brooklyn’s Field Guides, Ben Seretan tells the tale of a dead cormorant found on a hike in Monterey Bay. “It’s little heart had stopped but its wings were still warm,” Seretan explains, “and its body surprisingly light. It felt clean, at peace, and full of grace.” After showing the bird to his professor, a “maritime literature specialist with a soft spot for birds,” they decided to retrieve the body to donate to the Smithsonian. Getting an old beach towel, the professor “gently swaddled the cormorant, its head lolling back against his chest.”
This is Just a Place is will be released on Seretan’s Whatever’s Clever label this September, and his story is indicative of the Field Guides sound. They work in an organic style in which beauty and tragedy are tightly wound, the sure passing of time infusing things with a strange feeling, a simultaneous sadness and joy. The concluding image of the bird speaks to something deeper within their music too, the kindness and care of the act as its head rests against the man’s chest. Even in surrender to the reality of things, small acts of compassion can be found.
Though Field Guides has had a revolving cast of collaborators over the years, the project has always orbited around the central presence of Benedict Kupstas. This is Just a Place sees Field Guides reemerge with a new cast of talent. Taylor Bergren-Chrisman (upright bass, electric bass, piano, Hammond organ) Timothy Simmonds (electric guitar, 12-string acoustic guitar, percussion) Booker Stardrum (drum kit, percussion, bag of chips), and a wider cast of guests (including Alena Spanger, Fred Thomas, D. James Goodwin, Jamie Reeder, Angela Morris and more) join Kupstas and elevate his music and writing into something grand.
Lead single ‘Guessing at Animals’ sets the tone. With its narrator moving through the aftermath of heartbreak and slowly becoming enmeshed with someone else, the track might appear to be a regular breakup/new love tale, though to break the song into such terms is to deny its effervescent and idiosyncratic humanity. Images that might come off twee in the hands of others (playing tic-tac-toe on the back of a crush’s hand as your subway stop approaches, walking home alone and dreaming of what might be), feel playful and poignant, and mark This is Just a Place as an album to watch as we move into autumn.
Photo by Ivy Meissner, album art by Julia Huete