John Moreland - Visitor [CD]

After an impressive 2010s run of albums that earned him a devoted fanbase, accolades from outlets like The New York Times, Fresh Air, and Pitchfork, and a place in the upper echelon of modern Americana singer-songwriters, John Moreland has already taken two unexpected turns this decade, both of which highlight his fierce artistic independence. First, he released a brilliant and sonically layered folk-electronica meditation on modern alienation, 2022’s Birds In The Ceiling, that took some of his fans by surprise. Then, after wrapping up a difficult tour behind that record in November 2022, he stopped working entirely. He took an entire year off from playing shows and didn’t use a smartphone for 6 months. “At the end of that year, I was just like ‘Nobody call me’. I needed to not do anything for a while and just process,” Moreland says. After nearly a decade in the limelight, constantly jostled by the expectations of his audience, the music industry, and anonymous strangers online, he carved out some time to rest, heal, and reflect for the first time.

The result of that unplugged year at home is 2024’s Visitor, a folk-rock record that is intimate, immediate, deeply thoughtful, and catchy as hell. Moreland recorded the album at his home in Bixby, Oklahoma, in only ten days, playing nearly every instrument himself (his wife Pearl Rachinsky sang on one song, and his longtime collaborator John Calvin Abney contributed a guitar solo), as well as engineering and mixing the album. “Simplicity and immediacy felt very important to the process,” he says.

This is a return to the approach Moreland took on his breakthrough albums, 2013’s In The Throes and 2015’s High On Tulsa Heat, both of which were largely self-recorded at home with a small cadre of additional musicians. Echoes of these early albums can be heard on Visitor (Moreland makes a passing reference to In The Throes’ opening track “I Need You To Tell Me Who I Am” in two different songs on Visitor), which finds Moreland shutting out the noisy world outside, and the even noisier digital world in his pocket, to reconnect with a muse that’s had to increasingly compete for his attention in the intervening years. Visitor charts his journey back to this muse. If Birds In The Ceiling’s theme was alienation, Visitor’s theme is un-alienation.