Manzanita Falls – ‘Abilene’ (album stream) (premiere)

“Abilene is about death. Death and its struggle to be defined without life, and vice-versa,” says Manzanita Falls frontman Jeremy McCarten. This is reflected in the reflective lyricism and impassioned delivery of he and his band, which metamorphosed from out of what was originally going to be just an acoustic solo project.

“The inspiration for this album came to us on November 1, 2012, when we rolled our tour trailer just outside of Abilene, Texas,” continues McCarten. “We rolled three and a half times going 75mph. Miraculously, we survived, albeit with some broken bones, but we survived. After the wreck, we all felt like we had experienced some sort of brush with death, like a conversation had been made in the debris of that Texas highway.”

Though their sudden brush with danger in a near-death experience proved to be the basis for the album, it’s not its only inspiration. The North Bay artist goes on to detail the passing of some members of Manzanita Falls’s grandparents, saying:

“Last year, our drummer suddenly lost his mother to a brain hemorrhage. Shortly after that, I lost my grandmother. Both of us felt a conversation in the grips of our losses. When we wrote Abilene, we wanted to capture parts of that conversation and show our personal experiences in the songs of this album. Writing this album was almost like a way for us to cope with the constant struggle between living and loss in one’s lifetime.”

Abilene releases on August 4.