Lindsay Verrill had not considered the music of Little Mazarn as distinctly Texan. Both Verrill and the project’s other principle member Jeff Johnston are originally from Dallas and now based in Austin, but to be a touring musician is to give away some part of yourself in this regard. To sever your ties with place to instead become a resident of motion. The result is a kind of levelling. The curse of the constant traveller, where one sees so many places they all come to feel the same. Somewhere to eat, somewhere to sleep, a place to use the bathroom. If any sense of belonging takes root, it is to this process, not the landscapes in which it is practiced. It is to the act of moving itself.
So if the music of Little Mazarn was not especially Texan, then it was because it wasn’t especially anything. Anywhere music, written and performed wherever Verrill and Johnston happened to find themselves. Location was hardly the point. But dig beneath this surface and something else lies waiting. The duo are part of a rich Austin scene featuring the likes of Bill Callahan, Dana Falconberry, Patty Griffin, Okkervil River and Daniel Johnston, and in fact came together at The Hole in the Wall, a local dive bar famous for hosting the likes of Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams and Townes Van Zandt. “It’s tempting to say some of the ghosts which lingered there somehow attached themselves to the project,” we described in a short preview back in June. “But the experimental folk style […] suggests the opposite transaction occurred. As though [Verrill and Johnston] instead joined the spirits there, themselves now phantoms content to haunt the Texan land around them. Scouring for details, salvaging what they find.”
That Texas River Song, the new Little Mazarn record coming later this month on Dear Life Records, chooses to reengage with this latent belonging was not exactly a conscious decision. Grounded in their home state due to the global pandemic, Verrill and Johnston found themselves moving in smaller circles, their cross-country travels replaced by more modest excursions to the various waterways threading the Texan landscape. “The Llano, the Frio, the Colorado, the Guadalupe, the San Marcos, the Pecos, the Devil’s,” Verrill lists. “The rivers soaked up the burden of my sorrow and loss.” Days away from the world at large, days somehow outside of time. Marked not by passing hours but sights and experiences. The fishing raptors, the sunburn and small injuries. The slowness, the quickness, the sense of stories told and stories forthcoming, if only you are there to see. There’s a comforting stability to an environment always present yet ever-changing. What was it Heraclitus once said?
Today we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Texas River Song’, the title track around which the rest of the record is built. A public domain song of unknown origins. Unknown, that is, beyond being evidently Texan. “I cross’t the wide Pecos, forded Nueces / Swam the Guadalupe and followed the Brazos,” as the first verse opens. “Red River runs rusty and the Frio runs clear / Down by the Brazos I courted my dear.” A careful arrangement gathers itself around Verrill’s vocals. Johnston brings bowed bells, saw and electric bass, Verill cello banjo and upright bass, and Sam Rives plays piano and Alex Töth trumpet. The various elements arriving at intervals as though fed via tributaries, joining the main body, coalescing and adding their weight. What starts as a trickle mightn’t become anything more than a meander, but what a graceful, majestic meander it turns out to be.
The song is representative of a record which finds Little Mazarn at their most Texan. But unconsciously Texan, as though some spirit of the land leached in through the waters in which Verrill and Johnston sought refuge. Happenstance Texan, one which feels more true. “It is a Texas album,” Verrill puts it, “simply because it isn’t trying to be anything else. Crickets on Caddo Lake. Vignettes of lonesome hill country graveyards and starry prairie nights. Cowboys songs. Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. The quiet four walls of my room. I am a Texas musician simply by not trying to be anyone else or go anywhere else.”
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‘Texas River Song comes complete with a video filmed in San Marcos, shot and edited by Jordan Moser and produced by Moser along with Verrill herself:
Texas River Song is out on 19th August via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Jake Dapper