Valley Maker, the project of Austin Crane, has carved a niche in ruminative, folk-tinged indie rock across three albums over the last decade, most recently on 2018’s Rhododendron. The album took a sparse singer-songwriter blueprint and expanded it into rich and spacious indie rock, offering a clear evolution from the 2010 self-titled Valley Maker debut.
Now Valley Maker is back with a brand new single, ‘Mockingbird,’ a song which again sees Crane expand on the simple voice and guitar skeleton. Amy Godwin provides ethereal backing vocals, and Chris Icasiano subtle percussion, adding texture and poignancy to a track that is concerned with both memories of the past and concerns for the future.
“I wrote ‘Mockingbird’ within a week of moving to Columbia, SC,” Crane explains, “having just left my home of seven years in Seattle to return to the area and community I grew up in. It’s a song about trying to settle in while feeling quite unsettled.” Drawn to actions that might tie him to the place and give some link into the future, he planted a Japanese Maple in the yard. “There’s a line in the song that acknowledges how I’ll ‘sit for a while and watch it grow,'” Crane continues, “as a way of accepting that season of uncertainty and transition.”
This happened before the pandemic, and has come to take on new meaning in the ambiguous present. “The song resonates deeply, for me, with this strange season of life. Both the song and video meditate on memory, time and aging; they both try to embrace the uncertainty, absurdity and beauty of life; and they reflect a feeling of being in-between places and communities.”
The track comes complete with a video filmed and directed by Joseph Kolean and Zach Gutierrez, which includes Super 8 footage that Crane shot in and around his Columbia neighborhood. Memory and reflection are again the key themes and the combination of the domestic (family photos, familiar faces, a fridge magnetic collection) and the elemental (dramatic coastlines, woods and a strange, river-bound fire) capture visually what Valley maker does sonically.
‘Mockingbird’ is out now via Frenchkiss Records and you can get it from the Valley Maker Bandcamp page.
Cover photo by Bree Burchfield