How do you measure change when you’re isolated and stationary? When time feels like it’s stopped? We’ve all been joking about how time ceases to exist this year, but we have to acknowledge that so much has changed during this strange standstill, especially the basic things: the ways we communicate, work, relax, even grieve. On Old Growth, Otter’s sophomore triumph that dropped on January 16th, the folk duo likened changes like these to the ones that happen in an old growth forest.
“Change is happening even when you’re standing still in these spaces. On the surface, they are chaotic, overgrown, full of bugs (yep, we suffered from those bugs!). But the system keeps itself in balance,” said Donna Vatnick and Jason Kimball, the Massachusetts locals who make up Otter.
In fact, the entire album was recorded near the only old growth forest in Massachusetts. Similarly to their debut release, 2019’s Midwinter, Otter transports listeners to a serene setting, using field recordings taken from nature. This time, it sounds like we’re atop the rolling snowy hills in western Massachusetts. Specifically, the band says they were “outside of an old Airbnb farmhouse window in Shelburne Falls (near Greenfield, MA),” when they wrote the majority of the album in December 2019, before COVID-19, mass isolation, the election, and everything that came with those events.
So, Otter created the LP before they had any idea as to how their lives would change in the next year. Through spring, summer, and fall of 2020, the pair reworked the bones of Old Growth for a post-2020 audience. And we hear their attempt to reflect these subtle, but significant changes to their lives on the release. It’s like the album harnesses the power of all those elusive shifts that we ourselves are just coming to realize we experienced in the last year.
When asked about writing the songs, they said that as things began to drastically change in 2020, they started kneading out the sounds of the songs. “A lot of this we had to do over Zoom. Some of the songs changed a lot in the process, and we kept working them until they felt warm to us in the darker times that came.”
Like, between “Feral” and “Paws,” it’s hard to determine where the songs change– where one song starts and where it ends. And on the album’s title track, that concept is realized through a field recording interview featuring a New Hampshire farmer by the name of George Ewald. But this time, he’s talking about the heart. He says, “Where does the heart stop and the rest of the body begin? It’s all entwined, it’s all connected.”
“That interview is played over a voice memo of a song that was never ‘finished’ that we hoped to call ‘Old Growth,’” Otter said. “This album never really felt like a final ‘product’ to us, partially because it really captures us in process, and grappling with unexpected changes to the process.”
What they ended up with was a set of songs that exude warmth on a snowy night; a soft twinkle of lightness in the dark. But there truly is a balance to them. Where “Babushka” calls to mind acoustic, melodic swells you might hear on a Nick Drake track, the Russian lyrics address the anxiety that is central to Vatnick’s relationship with her aging Russian Jewish grandma– but also Vatnick’s admiration for her grandmother’s life. It sounds like a lullaby for a little spirit. Where we hear her heartbreaking vocals on songs like “Elephant” and “Green,” we’re also listening to lyrics about how to learn and grow with love.
And that balance among the changes was Otter’s mission for Old Growth, and for which old growth forests were the ultimate inspiration, ground zero for infinite changes to happen from all sides, with infinite consequences, all impacting each other. “This is the perspective we live by in our own lives,” they said. “These songs are ‘about’ forests, in that they circle around this idea: our relationships are everything.”
Stream Old Growth below via Bandcamp.