Over a three month period, Oregon-based songwriter Taylor Kopp retreated to a cabin in the foothills of Mt. Hood, using the time and space to see past the hubris of modern life. The isolation was doubly valuable, allowing a view of things both too big and too small for ordinary living, from the tiny folds and creases of his own self to the wide stretching environment around him. Kopp filled a notebook with songs during the trips, a collection that would eventually be recorded back home in Portland.
The result is Found, an album that’s clearly a product of the milieu in which it was crafted. It’s sound has a timeless quality, an unhurried and intimate brand of folk that echoes the rivers and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. “As I’ve gotten older, exploring the outdoors is one of the few things that still retains that childlike magic,” Kopp explains. “When I’m out in the woods with my friends I feel alive, and after a few nights sleeping under the stars all the noise and waste and tension of our hectic modern lives starts to fall away and it’s just you.”
This sense of contentment certainly comes through in the songs, but it is balanced by an equal and opposite sadness. “Several of the songs on Found are about trying to come to terms with the death of my brother,” Kopp explains. “About as heavy as it gets […] I remember initially being super self-conscious about that. Like, who’s gonna want to listen to such sad ass songs?” But self-perception is a funny thing, and from the outside the tracks shone with a different light. “As I began to share early versions with friends,” Kopp continues, “people would say ‘dude these are actually really hopeful.’ I didn’t even realize.”
This hope is conspicuous from the dawn warmth of the opening notes of ‘Mountain Highway Line’, a track that captures the first tentative moments of light on the horizon through the darkness of mourning. “This winter’s been long, it’s gone on and on,” Kopp sings, his voice a tender murmur. “And my family’s still reeling, from my brother being gone / but my love for you is an old folk song to rest my head upon.”
The track begins with the temptation to flee into the wildness, to leave everything behind because it has grown too heavy to carry. But it comes with a caveat, for Kopp does not want to go alone. Time and again on the record, the wish to escape is leavened by human connection. ‘The Skin I’m In’ finds Kopp not fitting into his own skin, but still aware of his unbelievable ability to love. “Sometimes I just don’t want to be me,” he says. “But I will.”
Still, the old American sense of freedom is key to the record, with tracks such as ‘California’ and ‘Shields of Mahogany’ finding solace in the very notion of space and distance. Indeed, the real moments of dejection on Found seem to stem from a lack of movement. The slow smoky atmosphere of ‘A Dream I Had’ unfurls with a resigned sadness, the late-night sorrow, cloudy and whiskey-scented, unmooring itself from within and pouring free. In contrast, the likes of ‘High Desert Nights’ or ‘Old and Beautiful’ might be no less mournful, but something in the motion of the tracks gets ahead of this feeling, prevents it from smothering and choking.
The latter, the album’s closing track, is a neat encapsulation of the record as a whole. The persevering conviction that something more valuable is exists. That meaning is possible, worth searching for, no matter what has been and done. Something old, something beautiful, something bigger than us up amongst the salmon runs and ponderosa pines.
“I’m gonna look, high and low,
to see if I can find something more.
I’m gonna dig, a big old hole
see if I can find something old and beautiful”
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Found is a record of both loss and hope, darkness and light. A record that understands this is more or less what nature is. The constant tension between having and losing, living and dying, the past and the present. But more than that, it is a collection of songs perceptive enough to realise that nature does not so much offer an escape from yourself, but the outside factors that make it so unbearable. As though to wilfully push into the realities of the environment, to become a mortal animal again, is to neuter its hold. The snatched morning in the mountains, under the shade of the trees as the river meanders past, is not so much a stay on that constant slide towards death, but rather a relaxing into this cast-iron rule. To be immersed in nature is to stop fighting against the motion of things. To find space. Space in which reflection, and therefore fondness, love even, can bloom.
Found is out now and available from the Taylor Kopp Bandcamp page.
Photos by Bradley Cox of Giant Eye Photography, album art by Brian Goodwin