The Great Awakening (2022)

by Shearwater

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Fate Luna These songs have become integral to my existence

sounds and silence Stunning album from Shearwater. Brings new layers of emotions with each listening. Thank you!

Evan Ortiz Such a departure from everything they've done in the past. This is a crafted natural soundscape that sounds both investigatory and explorative. Absolutely a masterpiece. Favorite track: Xenarthran.

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Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

PLEASE NOTE:

CDs and 2xLPs of The Great Awakening ARE AVAILABLE from most online and physical retailers.
CDs are in stock everywhere now—the 2xLPs are due to ship July 29th.

You can find sources for CDs and LPs, including local indie stores, at this link:

https://shearwater.ffm.to/thegreatawakening

The signed LPs and CDs listed below as 'SOLD OUT" were limited-edition items. They are no longer available.

We apologize for any confusion!

JM / SW ... more

Purchasable with gift card

$10 USD or more
"The Great Awakening" First Edition Signed 180g Double LP
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
NOTE: The first edition is sold out, but general release records are available from your favorite local or online record store - see shearwater.ffm.to/thegreatawakening

These 2xLPs, limited to 500 copies, are pressed on 180-gram vinyl, signed by JM, and have "First Print Edition" printed on the inside sleeve. They are the first run of LPs pressed from the plated lacquer master.

Includes unlimited streaming of The Great Awakening (2022) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Sold Out
"The Great Awakening" First Edition Signed CD
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
These CDs, limited to 500 copies, are signed by JM and have "First Print Edition" printed in the interior booklet.

Includes unlimited streaming of The Great Awakening (2022) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Sold Out

1.	Highgate 02:43	buy track
2.	No Reason 05:23	buy track
3.	Xenarthran 05:36	buy track
4.	Laguna Seca 04:49	buy track
5.	Everyone You Touch 03:46	buy track
6.	Empty Orchestra 05:06	buy track
7.	Milkweed 06:41	buy track
8.	Detritivore 05:35	buy track
9.	Aqaba 05:10	buy track
10.	There Goes The Sun 07:45	buy track
11.	Wind Is Love 04:55	buy track

about

In December 2016, during Shearwater’s last live show, bandleader Jonathan Meiburg picked up a slip of paper from the stage: a prayer request card, left behind by a church that had rented the Bowery Ballroom the night before.

“At the time,” Meiburg recalls, “it seemed like a grim joke.” The thundering songs of 2015’s Jet Plane and Oxbo, were filled with fears for what the United States was becoming, and the recent election had confirmed them. Meiburg held the card up to the audience, asked the heavens for the swift (and natural) death of Trump and his enablers, and tore into “Hail, Mary,” the howling climax of 2006’s Palo Santo.

After that, it was time to take a breath. Shearwater had recorded six LPs in ten years for Matador and Sub Pop, and toured the US and Europe many times; as the band drove home, Meiburg resolved to find a new approach. “I felt hopeless,” he admits. “And I didn’t want to make hopeless music.”

For the next five years, he stretched out in all directions. First on his mind was a book—a nonfiction epic called A Most Remarkable Creature (published by Knopf in 2021), which took him to remote corners of South America in search of the strange birds of prey called caracaras and their origins in deep time. Musically he went just as wide, staging a reconstruction of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy for WNYC’s New Sounds, issuing a set of instrumental albums on Bandcamp, and forming a new band—Loma—with Texan producer/engineer Dan Duszynski and singer Emily Cross. Loma made two dark and dreamlike albums for Sub Pop, and their self-titled debut found an admirer in Brian Eno, who collaborated with the band on the final track of their second LP, Don’t Shy Away.

And in 2020, Meiburg finally returned to Shearwater, setting up shop in a weathered RV near Duszynski’s studio to write an album that would reflect where he’d been. Above a makeshift desk, he placed a quote from TS Eliot: Be still, and wait without hope / for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wasn’t that also a kind of prayer? Meiburg smiles. “More like an approach I could believe in.”

With Duszynski as a fellow performer and co-producer, The Great Awakening evolved through the long months of 2020 and 2021, emerging as a meditation on hope amid hopelessness, and the freedoms to be found (or dreamed about) in isolation. Several Shearwater veterans returned, including keyboardist and arranger Emily Lee and drummer Josh Halpern, but the rock gestures of Jet Plane fell away: The Great Awakening is a soulful and immersive travelog of grand atmospheres and intimate landscapes, decorated with field recordings from Meiburg’s travels and anchored by his closely-recorded voice, more otherworldly and urgent than ever.

On loping lead single “Xenarthran,” he opens with a wry question—What did you expect?—then muddies the waters: the song’s hymn-like chorus circles back on itself, as if caught in an eddy, and resolves in a wash of strings and a choir of howler monkeys—evoking a world of deep shadows and tantalizing glimmers of light. The same is true of the gorgeous, enigmatic “Aqaba,” as close to a love song as Shearwater has ever made, and the superficially triumphant “Empty Orchestra” turns out, on closer inspection, to be a reckoning with nihilism’s seductive appeal.

It’s an album that couldn’t have been made by any other band. It’s hard not to hear The Great Awakening as the record Shearwater’s been striving toward for years: it’s a journey into the unknown, embracing sorrow and joy, beauty and terror. In the threshing of love’s distortions and shimmerings, Meiburg sings, The stubbornest husk falls away. And the dust rises up.

credits

released June 10, 2022

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