Any semi-regular reader of VSF will be familiar with the work of Max García Conover. Be it from releases such as last year’s LP deer or the sizeable collection of singles, or indeed collaborations with the likes of Haley Heynderickx and Julia Arsenault. A vast body of work all tied together by what we’ve previously described as “a distinctive balance between wistful reflection, playful observation and a pervasive sense of emotion that wavers between subtle ache and urgent sting.”
Conover’s latest release, everything in winter, is no less intimate, though this time the tone was baked into the songs from their origins. Because each track on the EP was at least partly inspired by a collection of letters Conover found in a suitcase. Letters written by his grandfather to his grandmother which had been sitting for seventy years. “He wrote them in the late 1940s while my grandmother was quarantined in a hospital for the consumptive poor,” Conover explains. “He was sixteen and for two years he poured all his love and frustration and hope for the future into those letters.” The songs of everything in winter might extend their view and subject matter beyond the words transcribed there, but the voice and beliefs of Conover’s grandfather underpins their mood and feel.
With backing vocals from Paula Prieto, the songs are as heartfelt and contemplative as anything Conover has written. Take opener ‘5 to 4’, the barely murmured vocals aching with a sense of tender longing though soon bound up in the enlivening momentum which so often threads the song writing of Max García Conover. The sense that some building heart or conviction is fired by the act of writing, of singing, of the way words fit together in their simple beauty to conjure the “breath of all these sacred things”:
so we named the house a country
and we named our bodies home
there was everything and nothing
little stories that we told
while a border blazed in heat and pain
a fog like burning fields revealed
machines of human wonder
making rackets reel to reel
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The title track is warmed with an easy-going fondness, before ‘Yeye Won’t Wait’ offers a richer, brighter tone, its widescreen sound evoking the romance of its story as it exists free from the shackles of any surrounding context. A snatched moment outside of history’s weight or any of the inevitable loss down the line. ‘The Wedding Line’ loses none of the love but the melancholy seeps back in, its words addressing a hoped for future, its reality lifted with promises, before closer ‘Caw’ harks back to the love and longing of the opener. Life comes with deep joys and desperate sadness, and Max García Conover has made it his business to sit attentive to both.
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everything in winter is out now and available from the Max García Conover Bandcamp page.