“An unhurried and intimate brand of folk that echoes the rivers and mountains of the Pacific Northwest.” That’s how we described Found, the album by Portland songwriter Taylor Kopp, back in 2020. Written in response to the death of his brother, the collection of songs delved into the worst of experiences and emerged with something to salvage. Some semblance of peace amid the mourning that Kopp located in the surrounding environment. “A record of both loss and hope, darkness and light,” as we put it. “A record that understands this is more or less what nature is.” As our review continued:
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.
Now Taylor Kopp is back with the appropriately titled EP The Movin’ On, his first release since Found and one recorded with some sense of time and distance between him and the grief which marked the previous album. With help from new collaborator Raymond Richards (the producer and pedal steel player who has worked with Blitzen Trapper and Local Natives), Kopp evolves his classic folk sound with an almost ethereal edge, sticking with the earnest emotion and narrative-led style but now insisting the gaze of his characters is fixed on the future instead of the past. Something noted head-on in single ‘Folded Paper’: “I saw that piece of folded paper / As I approached my dining room table / The ink it bled right through And right away I knew / That you were gone,” as the opening verse goes, though the narrator decides against wallowing in the moment:
I left that piece of folded paper
Untouched for weeks my dining room table
What good would reading it do?
I’d rather skip right to
The movin on
Written at what Kopp describes as “the intersection of seeking and finding love,” ‘The Orchard’ follows this sentiment further, leaning into the ebb and flow of life in trust that such a journey always leads forward. “I’ve been trying to be more like that river,” as Kopp sings. “How it winds and twists and turns / But keeps moving onward / Even as the forest around it burns.” The track serves as an encapsulation of the release as a whole. One not only now willing to be carried forward on the current of life without knowing what is around the next bend, but one which finds comfort in that very fact.
The Movin’ On is out now and available via Taylor Kopp Bandcamp page.