When Decoration Day spent the summer of 2019 recording a debut album about the uncertainty of life, they had no idea how 2020 would make this release even more topical. Though the album, Makeshift Future, is being released only a year after it was recorded, it’s arriving in a world still grappling with the disquietude of COVID-19 that makes the record a newer, more relevant context.

In late June, Decoration Day announced the album with lead single “Lanark County,” a piercing folk song that firmly sets the tone for the album to come. Starting sparsely with acoustic guitar and upright bass, the song chillingly expands with piano, clarinet, and layered harmonies that bring the piece to an enveloping coda. The lyrics follow “a kind of surreal dream logic” involving an experience that band member Justin Orok had visiting the titular location and “this just-below-the-surface hostility” felt there. In just over three minutes, Decoration Day paints a vivid, haunting scene with “Lanark County” that fully immerses the listener in its incertitude.

We talked to Tiffany Wu (songwriter/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist) and Justin Orok (songwriter/vocalist/guitarist) about how “Lanark County” came to be and how it fits into their upcoming album Makeshift Future.

Allston Pudding: The press release for “Lanark County” talks about how the song came from visiting an idyllic town there and the unease it caused. Could you talk about what the experience of visiting that town felt like and how it inspired the song?

Justin Orok: I guess, when I wrote that, I was thinking of how my neighbors have been building a house for like two or three years now. We don’t really know them, and they’re kind of secretive, and they also ride dirt bikes in the middle of the night and make a lot of noise. So it was just thinking of that when I wrote the song, that kind of hostility.

AP: The press release also mentioned that you had since moved to Lanark County. Did that happen before or after the song was recorded?

JO: It was before it was recorded, but after it was written.

AP: Did you feel as if that affected the recording process for the song at all?

JO: Yeah, I think that — after I moved here — the meaning of the song kind of changed, because I’m kind of in a transition stage of my life. So the song sort of became about that.

AP: One thing I noticed is that a lot of the descriptions of the song seem to be rooted in nature, which I also noticed was in a lot of the lyricism on [previous EP] Blind Contour. Do either of you feel like nature plays a role in informing your lyric-writing process?

JO: I’ll let Tiff talk about Blind Contour because she wrote all the lyrics for that one. For “Lanark County,” definitely, yeah, I was thinking of a very specific place. I’m actually here, outside in Lanark County right now. And I feel like the sound of Decoration Day is kind of in that vibe. We kind of strive toward that more naturalistic, acoustic sound. So, yeah, definitely.

Tiffany Wu: Yeah, I guess in terms of lyrics, nature and that type of imagery definitely inspires me a lot. I find that, when I write — and I don’t know if this is true for Justin as well — I see everything around me as a metaphor, sometimes to a fault. I just see the world in a really romantic way. And nature is everywhere. So wherever I look, if I’m feeling something really intensely, I always see it reflected somehow in the way nature around me is moving and feel really viscerally connected to it. [It’s a way] to convey some kind of experience or emotion.

AP: Both the song “Lanark County” and the album Makeshift Future deal with uncertainty, but I read the last line of “Lanark County” (“there’s a sprawling scene of all the lives you can lead”) as bittersweetly optimistic. That there’s uncertainty, but also a number of possible lives ahead. Was that the intent, or was there another sort of effect you wanted those last lines to have?

JO: No, that was it, yeah. For me, it was more of a personal thing and I’m sure other people will interpret it differently. But for me, I was basically trying to decide if I was going to pursue art as a career or shift focus to something else. And for some reason, being in Lanark County really brings that conflict out in me. So that’s what that was about.

AP: How does this song fit into the album, and how does that theme of uncertainty develop and unfold across the rest of Makeshift Future?

JO: I think of “Lanark County” as kind of a transition song, just in terms of its flow. Because the form is very different from the other songs on the record. On the rest of the record, the other songs are very structured and they have sort of typical folk song forms. Whereas this song is just sort of stream-of-consciousness right through. There’s no real verse or chorus or anything. And so I think of it sort of like a river of something leading into the other songs, which have really specific character-driven stories. Though we weren’t making a conscious statement that those [stories in the other songs] are the lives in the lyrics [at the end of “Lanark County”].

TW: I think the fact that this song is a vision song flows into the album nicely because a lot of themes in the rest of the album are about imagining a future and making your way through chaos. To me, when I interpret it, that’s what the last line of “Lanark County” feels like. It’s improvising, kind of just going with it, and there’s no real ending to it. The notion of building something new is present throughout the rest of the album and having questions pondered on but maybe not necessarily answered is also something that happens throughout the album.

AP: To wrap things up, because uncertainty is such a big theme across Makeshift Future and the album was actually recorded last summer, how have each of you sensed the themes behind the record continue to be present or evolve since you recorded it?

JO: For me, it’s just ringing even more true these days. Even the songs sort of take on a different meaning. Like, there’s a song we wrote about disease there, and nobody in the band had any diseases at the time that I wrote it. And then I came down with something, and then COVID happened. Things would be shifting and changing as time passed.

TW: It’s been interesting to see that shift in my perspective and how I experience the songs now that it’s been a year, even as 2020 has had like ten years’ worth of things happening in the world. A lot of the songs I wrote on the album are super personal, but I guess as everyone is going through this global experience, there’s a sense of my personal experience being universal. There’s comfort in that.

Decoration Day’s debut album Makeshift Future will be released on September 18, 2020. Listen to the single “Lanark County” below.