Shane Parish is perhaps best known as a founding member of Asheville experimental rock band Ahleuchatistas. In 2016, he released Undertaker Please Drive Slow on Tzadik records, an album which marked a shift in his creative output. Bringing together the technical showmanship of Ahleuchatistas with the subdued vibes of his improvised work, the album felt like an arrival, the logical end-point after years of exploration. As Dear Life Records put it, “the trying subsided, and the music flowed.”
This new-found sense of self-discovery led Parish to pick up his copy of Fireside Book of Folk Songs, a gift from a friend which had sat among his sheet music collection for months. He began to work through the collection of traditional folk songs (“sea shanties, ballads, work songs, hymns”) in his new intuitive style. Parish recorded every song in the book, 147 in total, in an exhaustive and wildly ambitious project. Way Haul Away, released by the aforementioned Dear Life Records, handpicks twelve of these songs to form something of a conventional album.
Even across just twelve tracks we get a little of everything. The Neapolitan boat song ‘Santa Luica’ sits alongside Appalachian blues (‘Every Night When the Sun Goes In’) and the Mexican love song ‘La Jesucita’, while ‘Red River Valley’ provides the obligatory cowboy number. Importantly, Parish is tuned into each track’s historical implications. For instance, he confesses a love for sea shanties (such as opener ‘Haul Away, Joe’) in a piece with American Songwriter, focusing on their role in fostering community and collaboration in the dangerous conditions faced by men at sea. “Shanties are meant to ease the burden of heavy and dangerous work through song,” he describes, “by linking up your movements and your breathing with your fellow workers so that the ship operates as a singular organism.”
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3406989025 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=45715942]
There’s history too on ‘Joe Hill’, an eulogy for the labour organiser of the same name. Parish spins the song into patient and intricate patterns, extending it beyond seven minutes in what he describes as a “meditation on justice.” Closer ‘Arkansas Traveler’ takes us back to the nineteenth century, an ode to the joy of making music. It feels like a fitting close, capturing the atmosphere not just of the album but Parish’s project as a whole.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3406989025 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=4288967640]
Way Haul Away is out now Dear Life Records. Get it via Bandcamp.
