During the mid-sixties, numerous residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia reported seeing the Mothman, a large winged creature with glowing red eyes. This portentous image was made all the more chilling when the town’s Silver Bridge collapsed soon after, leading many to draw a connection between the two occurrences. The story is just one of a whole file of supernatural stores which came to inspire Many Disappeared, the new album from Matt Longo’s Thin Lear, forthcoming from First City Artists which uses all things weird and unexplained as a way to explore themes altogether more human and personal. As Longo puts it: “I’ve always gravitated to bizarre tales to access my own feelings.”
Thin Lear has now shared the lead single and opening track of Many Disappeared, and there are no prizes for guessing which tale ‘Silver Bridge’ takes as its focus. Directly concerned with the Mothman legend, the song uses the myth as a way to investigate grief and its accompanied challenges, pushing deeper than the usual cheap thrills of the story to probe at the weightiest of issues. “Told from the perspective of a man who has lost his brother, and his main lifeline to the world, the song is less about the creature and more about the value, or lack of value, of brushes with the paranormal if, in the end, we still have to reckon with loss alone,” Longo explains. “I need something supernatural to wrestle with, just to understand my own earthly troubles,” he continues. “I write to access a feeling and get past it.”
Photo by Anna Rhody