Earlier this year, Portland, Maine‘s Wildflower released a new full-length album, Green World, both an evolution of the place-based sound introduced on previous record The Ocean Rose and the ideal introduction for any newcomers. The project, lead by Adrian O’Barr, specialise in smooth and meditative songs that draw on elements of folk and ambient and soft rock to evoke the Maine coastline and the meditative, sometimes transcendent headspace that can be achieved when exploring it. O’Barr described The Ocean Rose as “essentially a love song to the present moment,” and each song on Green World continues such a style, each playing like a painting or diorama of a specific time and place that not only captures small details but combines them into something much larger—the cool breeze and the cry of a gull, the briny scent of the ocean and the slanting sunlight as it glitters across the water.
Opener ‘Seabirds’ is an almost ten minute slide into Wildflower’s Green World, serving as both a journey into its calm and verdant lands and mission statement as to what the record is all about. An extended jam with space to breathe, its snaking sax and winding pedal steel evoke panoramic views and contemplations of a better life. “Seabirds rising through the fog,” O’Barr sings when his voice arrives a third of the way in, “Dreaming of a place I’d like to live.” This same spirit is present across the album, many of the songs wrapped in the quiet promise of early morning or the dusky calm of evening, the quiet wonder of the present becoming its own kind of reverie.
We took the opportunity to chat with O’Barr about the album, his collaborators, and the influence of British folk rock and Brian Eno.
Thanks for speaking to us! How is life now that Green World is released?
Life has been good, rich and busy! We did a two week tour around the Northeast U.S. and into Canada to celebrate the record release and it was really lovely. Played great shows, stayed with old friends, made new ones… The album seems to be really moving people and having it live its own life in the world is bringing me a lot of joy. Releasing music always feels like setting a bird free, exciting but also kind of unburdening. Now I am kind of free of it and can start fully immersing myself in the next batch of songs.
Your music has always struck me as having a very evocative sense of place. Like, if you were a painter, you would paint landscapes. Are there specific locations that inspired this record? And if so, does each song have a particular one? Or is it more something that creeps across the album as a whole?
With this record, I wanted it to be fully present in my home on the Maine coast. I even thought about calling it Atlantic Ocean or something like that at first, with each song title as a place name on a reimagined map of the coast as an album cover. There are definitely songs rooted in very precise places, but it also kind of crept into a more general mood/concept for the record. We live in Portland, which is in the southern part of the state, but also spend a lot of time down east in this really small fishing village along the Canadian border called Lubec. A bunch of songs are about that area and the spiritual connection my wife and I feel with that landscape. It is kind of harsh up there, stunted and windblown with huge tides, but it is so resonant for us. Kind of a thin place between worlds. I really wanted to capture that feeling in the songs.
I also wanted to make sure I captured that sense of place for our actual home in Portland, and title track ‘Green World’ is about the Casco Bay where the city sits. I work as a carpenter by day and spent a couple years fixing old houses on some of the islands that are just offshore. One spring in particular I was noticing a ton of blue herons around the bay as we would ferry out to work. I mentioned it to a friend who was pruning trees on the island and he told me that the indigenous name for the bay was ‘Aucocisco’ which means a place of herons. This really moved me. This is idea that there are things that are innate to our landscapes that we just have to slow down to notice. Also this idea of being able to see a city as a natural place, a part of the natural world rather than seeing it as somehow separate.
Perhaps related to that last question. I’m interested in the title—Green World. What does that phrase mean to you? And what is its significance across the record?
In the most specific sense, the title comes from a line in the last song on the record, ‘Open Ocean’. It was one of the first things I wrote for the album and I think it’s kind of the emotional crux of it: “but you can’t escape the sky or plastic on the beach. Those rolling hills and sweet roads, this green world with its gold shores…” There’s really no escaping the damage we’ve already done to our environment, felt through the ever changing weather and the trash that washes up in even the most remote places, but I find myself just completely in love with this world, and wanted to make an album that celebrated that without ignoring the existential crises we face. Green World felt like the right name for this place we love.
Unavoidably, it’s also kind of a reference to the Eno album. I wanted to make a folk rock album that had a high ratio of long instrumental passages and contained some of the ideas of ambient music (best reflected in ‘Seabirds’). I had the title and was thinking of “Another Green World”, and the idea that a better place is elsewhere. The full title for me is really “This Green World”, encapsulating the idea that a better place is contained in the one we have, and that realizing it is a matter of seeing it. Maybe that’s what Eno meant as well…
Andrew Barton’s excellent liner notes talk about how your songs tap into the “quiet that settles inside you when you really notice the world,” which I thought was a lovely description. Is this sense of peaceful presence something you set out to capture in your music? Is there a spiritual side to your evocation of the natural world?
Definitely! One of my favorite pastimes is walking my dogs, either with my wife or alone with my thoughts. Every once in a while there are these perfect moments where everything kind of freezes and I feel like I am gone, or sort of absorbed into the world. I always try to hold that feeling, then let it go, not really cataloging it, but just fully feeling it. A similar thing happens to me when I play guitar (my other favorite way to spend time)… I disappear into the search for new melodies and kind of lose myself in those moments. I see songwriting as a way to try to reaccess those portals, to find those feelings and communicate them. My hope is that this translates into the finished songs and that they kind of become portals for others. This walking, guitar playing, searching is sort of the essence of my pedestrian spirituality, and it all about being a part of the natural world.
Musically speaking, this is still very much a Wildflower record, but there are subtle changes too. Is it fair to say you have leant more heavily into the 70s? And perhaps taken inspiration from the other side of the Atlantic too?
Yeah, I really wanted to make a record that was a little closer to the music I actually listen to all the time. I am huge fan of traditional Celtic music and British folk rock from the 70s: Bert Jansch, Andy Irvine, Sandy Denny, all that stuff. Those are the records that I am always spinning at our house, kind of the deep well I can always draw from. Wildflower used to get a lot more Neil Young comparisons (which I definitely welcomed) but I wanted to consciously move away from that Laurel Canyon/West Coast sound. As I said before, I also listen to a lot of ambient music, especially the Cluster records from the 70s. I feel like instrumental music can convey a sense of place in a way that lyrical songs sometimes can’t, and took inspiration from that idea, trying to build in longer instrumental passages to convey the landscape here. I also enjoyed thinking of the songs as landscapes themselves and of the different instruments as things moving through them, the wind, clouds, stray beams of light. Like the ensemble are the elements that animate the landscape, if you know what I mean?
But yeah, my goal is to try and make what I call “Atlantic music” and I feel a real kinship with the music from across the sea.
I’ve seen you refer to Green World as “the end of an era”. How has the Wildflower line-up changed from previous records? Who plays on this one? And what does this collaboration bring to the finished product?
Wildflower used to be a set lineup with some of my closest friends, some of whom were around from the beginning. As we got a little older and the pandemic stopped us in our tracks, people’s lives shifted enough that playing music just became less of a priority for them. I already wrote everything for the band, so I decided to kind of fully own the project and seek out new people to collaborate with. I really thought about making this album as a solo record, but ultimately just decided to really claim and embody the Wildflower name, and set about changing the sound.
Two of the old members (Jason Eckerson and Matt Maiello) played on Green World as a nice send off to the old version of the project and also provided a sense of continuity. My good friend Andrew Weaver, who tours with Widowspeak and also writes amazing songs, really helped shift the center of the sound. He is also a big fan of Fairport, Pentagle, all that stuff, so he was immediately able to hear the vision when I sent the acoustic demos. The pedal steel is played by Hamilton Belk who is an absolute ace living here in Maine. The sax was played by a genuine hero of mine, Joseph Shabason who used to play with Destroyer and makes incredible solo music. Kaputt was a really foundational album for me, so hearing him blow on some my songs kind of brought some parts of musical journey full circle. My friend Kevin Sullivan who I met touring plays bass on a few of the songs and, finally, MorganEve Swain who’s band Huntress and the Holder of Hands I love, played fiddle on the title track and sang harmonies on a few of the songs.
I think all these people brought a ton to the album. I see my job as making the songs and vision of the project as crystal clear as possible, as if the initial seed I create almost contains the whole. It took me a while, but over time I’ve learned that you get more out of people if you let them really express themselves and don’t try to control what they do. If they can understand the vision, they find their own way to participate in it and elevate it. So yeah, I work with people for who they are and how they play, and the generosity of what all the people bring to the music really amazes me. Also, when I listen to the album I just hear all these people I love playing, which brings me so much joy!
On a related note, if this is an end of an era, do you know what comes next for Wildflower?
It’s a good question! I’ve been finding a lot of gratification in playing solo, so I have been working on that practice and am planning to tour a bunch that way this year. I have a new record mostly written and am probably going to return to the studio this fall… hopefully just continuing to pursue a path in music that is both fulfilling and financially sustainable. Thanks for all of these truly thoughtful questions to respond to. They were lovely to answer.
Green World is out now and available from the Wildflower Bandcamp page.
