Grief & Praise by The Whiskey Priest

Track List:

1. An Invocation

2. When You Were Stretched Out In Front Of Me

3. No Complaints

4. A Moon Spell

5. The Last Word

6. What It Means

7. The Lotus

8. The Night I First Knocked On Your Door

In 2017 Seth began working on the follow up to 2014’s Mean Spirit, with longtime friend and collaborator Alex Dupree. Together with Los Angeles-based drummer Parker Law, Seth and Alex convened at John Michael Landon’s Estuary Recording in Austin over New Year’s 2019. During that session, and then back home in Albuquerque at The Casita, the songs began to depart drastically from the safe realm of a guitar-playing songwriter into new arenas of keyboards, synths, samplers, and triggered sounds. The goal became to keep any and all guitars off to the side, for sonic textures only, and let these other elements carry the weight of the songs.

Things slowed down in 2020 during the pandemic, but that only allowed for the involvement of other collaborators. Chris Simpson (Mineral/The Gloria Record/Mountain Time) and Aisha Burns (Julien Baker/Balmorhea/Thor & Friends) lent their voices to the track “The Lotus,” and Emily Cross, lead singer of Sub Pop band Loma, shares lead vocals with Seth on “The Last Word.” The album, now titled Grief & Praise, went back to Austin to be mixed at Estuary.

Broadly, these songs are wrapped in the dual world of love and loss. As the author Martín Prechtel writes, “Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise.” Specifically, these songs take place and are rooted in the American South West: Big Bend and the Rio Grande, The Sandia Mountains, Taos Mesa, the South Valley of Albuquerque. Grief & Praise represents a decade of living in New Mexico, a decade of love received and friends lost, long drives and quiet nights, all soaked through with beauty and heartache and sung back out to the world.