The recording project of Sam Cantor, Minor Moon has made a name crafting detailed, ambitious songs that push indie rock and Americana into unconventional spaces. This is true of the lyricism, which often explores personal themes through existential, philosophical and spiritual lenses, but the arrangements too, with Cantor possessing left-field sensibilities in how each track emerges and evolves. Couple in the work of core band members Nathan Bojko (drums), Michael Downing (bass) and Colin Drozdoff (keyboards), as well as appearances from the likes of Konstantine Stebliy, V.V. Lightbody, Macie Stewart, Nora Barton, Nick Broste, Alex Blomarz and others, and the imaginative, lush sound moves into relief. Songs rooted in classic folk rock, yet never confined within its formulas, making each Minor Moon song something of a journey, and one which never quite reveals its destination.
The latest Minor Moon record, Tethers, expands this idea to the length of an album. A joint release between Ruination Record Co. and Whatever’s Clever, it tones down some of the ambition within each song, instead favouring a larger interconnected narrative that unfolds across the entire record. This involves a version of the classic quest that’s based within a psych-tinged science fiction setting which blurs the boundary between fantastic, mythic and realist worlds, Cantor’s way to explore the meaning and consequence of personal turmoil he faced while working on the album. “Minor Moon songs have always had this arc of discovery and I’ve always used them as a way to dive into really personal, philosophical, or emotional problems,” says Cantor. “It’s about finding some truth looking inward.”
But unlike the traditional quest, the narrator of Tethers does not find some magical object, nor return home with answers. Rather, the journey’s discovery is that sometimes questions are themselves the answer, that this kind of journey never really ends. The lasting impression of the record is the sense of epiphany suspended. Deferred until some undesignated future. There’s a sense of dawning realisation that the journey is not some line from A to B, but rather one segment of a more perpetual motion. A constant progression that is always unfolding. “I said I’m feeling caught in a loop at the end,” Cantor sings on ‘The First Time You Left Home’. “But it’s just the beginning / Well, how about that?”
We took the opportunity to speak with Cantor to delve a little deeper into Tethers, and the Minor Moon project as a whole.
Tethers seems like an album of two worlds. On the one hand, there’s the down to earth ‘realism’ present in earnest vocals, the Midwestern twang, but then this far stranger, almost science fiction dimension that phases in and out of the songs. Is this setting unique to this record, a kind of rule or constraint that marks Tethers out from your other work? Or just a further step more generally into a free-flowing, explorative style?
Tethers has a much more cohesive album-length concept than anything I’ve written before. The songs on previous records were often referencing each other and diving into common themes, but each track really stood on its own. I would often write these big songs that contained their own complete arc with thematic tension and resolution. I discovered that trying to do so much within the span of a single song wasn’t working for me when I was writing for this record. I don’t think that kind of tension-resolution blueprint resonated with me, and neither did a head-on, more confessional approach to writing about difficult experiences. So it had to come from storytelling. I was reading a lot of fiction with fantasy or sci-fi elements, and I read this book by Italo Calvino called Invisible Cities that just blew my mind open. I started to play around with this interdimensional adventure narrative structure for Tethers that anchored the writing and allowed me to dive further into each portion of the narrator’s journey, and that pushed me to deepen the meaning of the story itself.
Meanwhile, with all of that layered storytelling going on in the lyrics, I really wanted to make this record inviting to anyone listening for the first time. I think the music I love the most has both an immediate and layered quality. It was a big area of growth for me as a songwriter and producer to work harder to actively invite the listener in rather than just say what I had to say. And I learned how to do this better mostly by playing lots of live shows. When we started introducing these songs into our set in 2019, people were responding with a lot of excitement, and we wanted to make sure to capture that vibrancy and energy on the record.
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‘No Lightning Fix’ is said to be something of a thesis statement for the record, so could you expand a little on that? There’s the sense of an almost classic quest unfolding, moving on from the chaos of opener ‘Ground’, only the exact aim or destination is left unclear. There is no neat conclusion, and much of the imagery and symbols remain opaque. But if your previous record felt conflicted and disorientated within such conditions, the mindset seems to have shifted here.
Well, the narrator finds themselves in a landscape of endless flatness (“the tiled plane”), and in the verses, travels to and then down into a fountain that is a gateway to an abyss, towards a “silvery door” that inexplicably holds some kind of secret they are searching for. Meanwhile, the chorus moves to a more general tone, describing how memory and past experience are constantly shaping us, “rattling” within us, and making it difficult to understand who we are. The chorus hints that perhaps there is some kind of deeper answer among all of that chaotic debris, something that you’ve known all along (“a cloud of smoke you’ve seen before”). This lyric is actually a reference to a Yom Kippur sermon I heard last year describing The Ark in the Hebrew bible. It’s said to have been filled with incense, clouded in smoke in order to protect the high priest from direct exposure to the sacred.
From a literary and spiritual perspective, I was taken with that image, and how it correlates to the limits of self-knowledge. In the record, the narrator will eventually reach beyond the “silvery door,” and encounter that cloud of smoke (see: Obvious Blessing) and be cast back out into the mundane world (see: So Quiet / Was There Anything Else) with everything the same and no great clarifying epiphany (The First Time You Left Home). In other words, there is “no lightning fix,” even when you’ve seen the center.
I think that accepting this lack of any great epiphany is crucial to experiencing life as it is. We can better access beauty, pain, love, loss more clearly and honestly when we shed the anxiety that we are missing the big secret or that it’s within our power to really know “The Way” forward. Instead we feel, we learn, we change and become, we try to be good to each other and hopefully we grow; we will never really know what we’re doing but we try anyway and there’s meaning and beauty in that very act of affirmation.
Could we drill a little deeper into some individual lines? From ‘No Lightning Fix’: “I dipped my feet inside / Like Rome back in ’45 / Violence and history / Have no boundary / In this light.” This caught my eye, because until this point I’d been thinking of the record as representation of a personal present, but this throws us backwards, and widens the scope considerably beyond the personal relationship underpinning the record.
Well… this one is a little hard for me to explain in a coherent way but I’ll try. The line was inspired by this big WWII monument in DC we walked through while on tour in summer of 2018. It’s a big fountain / pool and invites visitors to literally dip their feet in. It was apparently inspired by this moment right at the end of the war when Allied soldiers were partying and celebrating by bathing in the fountains across the city.
Later on I kept writing about this imaginary fountain (not the one in DC), I’m honestly not exactly sure why but the image kept popping into my head when I’d write—and the fountain ended up becoming this portal between various dimensions in my weird story. And I imagined this place, this tiled plane, outside of space and time. That tiled plane is a very personal place, but there is a philosophical element to it. The idea is inspired by this concept from Walter Benjamin of messianic time—which I’ll do a bad job of explaining in a sentence, but essentially it’s his notion that revolutionary possibility can be thought of as this timeless potential, it can exist both within and somehow irrespective of a given historical moment. On the record I’m not directly referencing messianic time per se, but in this story the narrator is inhabiting a space that has that flavor. And so you have the narrator in this tiled plane desert, dipping their feet into a fountain, stating that there is no boundary between this fountain dip in the weird cosmic desert and the fountain dip in some other completely foreign historical moment on earth (“Rome back in ’45”)—this is a part of what it means to live in history. Everything is connected, sometimes in surprisingly immediate ways, and there’s the potential for danger or for peace all of the time. So this song is in a personal world, but the conclusions aren’t confined to that world. And it’s no coincidence that the narrator, upon making that uneasy and confusing statement, gets sucked away from that contemplative space and into this other chapter in the journey—I think that kind of 10,000 ft view awareness is really hard to maintain. It’s certainly hard for me to explain, and I’ve done a mediocre and incomplete job here, but I do think it’s a really important moment on the record and I’m glad you asked about it.
Those lines are followed by the idea of “a thick, unending ocean / A million holes,” and such subterranean imagery continues into the next tracks. From the first lines there’s this danger of the ground cracking, of falling somewhere dark and deep. Could you talk a little about this idea of being underground?
All of this underground imagery on Tethers has two main qualities, and they kind of contradict each other. The first is depressive, nihilistic, hopeless; the second is excavation, exploration, searching for truth. I experienced this intense period of my life when these forces were really battling each other, and what both of them had in common was an inward pull. ‘The underground’ is that inward pull—towards liberatory self-knowledge but also potentially towards destructive isolation. There’s danger and darkness there, but also a really necessary and powerful journey going on.
There’s a line right at the end of the penultimate track which resonated. “What do we talk about / When we talk about freedom?” This seems like a good time to discuss the title too, and how the idea of being tethered is juxtaposed against the linear narrative of the protagonist’s experiences.
Well, I think freedom is something I’ve continually reshaped my understanding of over the years. That’s still ongoing. One of the implicit conclusions of Tethers (for me) is that we can and should seek freedom, but that it will never be some cosmically clean break from what we feel is binding us. As long as we are alive, we are always going to be constrained and influenced by our past, our attachments, love, loss, joy, culture, language, history etc. We’re tethered creatures and we’re all stuck in a big web, but we can still find freedom in the way we inhabit the tangled mess. With all of that in mind, I think one form of freedom is simply being willing and able to ask the question knowing that there may not be a final answer.
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Tethers is out now via Ruination Record Co. and Whatever’s Clever and you can get it from the Minor Moon Bandcamp page.
Art and design by Benedict Kupstas