Jonathan Meiberg listened to the songs from this session the other day, after a while away from them, and found that he was personally appalled by his vocal performance that given Sunday morning. He used that word — appalled — at least three times in a short phone conversation and in an e-mail, it popped up once again. He thought that he didn’t have any voice left that day, coming at the end of a lengthy tour. He’s hoping he can come back one day and redeem himself. First matter’s first: He can come back any random day he pleases – as you’ll quickly hear. Give us a half an hour lead time and we’ll be waiting for him, a tall latte with a double shot or whatever he wants from the neighborhood coffeehouse in hand. The second matter, the belief that there’s something horrific or dismaying about the way his spectral slopes of alchemic sauntering marble their way into the prevailing mood feels inconsequential if only because the tiny humanly cracks and burps – though few and barely noticeable – are the very things that press on one’s pulse and make one thankful that you could see these songs as rogues. There are places to wear fancy, frilly dresses and dinner jackets and cuff links, sure, but what are all those people thinking in those suits and dresses and coats and ties thinking while they’re doing that: I can’t wait to get out of this goddamn dress/suit/coat/tie and into a T-shirt. We treasure songs when they’ve got more floor dirt on them than shine. It’s at those points – when they’re just skin and bones – when you can either take them or leave them behind forever. Hearing something less perfectly or in an altered form – possibly a completely foreign setting – is the point where we make up our minds and whether the song shows that it’s got legs and a working heart. We dig that in a song, when it can affect us even more when it’s randomly wrinkled or ruffled. We find nothing wrong with these songs. We find that we love them more with each passing day because they work us like a stiff gust and a warm massage. Meiberg need not worry that we’ll think less of him for being fatigued (even if it is almost imperceptible) because we’re really more enamored than we might have been had he delivered the melodies to us spot-on. We’re thankful for the imperfections that lend themselves to the kind of angelic voice that we can hear in Chan Marshall and Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. – Sean Moeller

First song
Fierce Little Lark (Shearwater) [3.69MB] [3362 downloads]


– unreleased
For song descriptions, Meiburg reserves the right to keep the Shearwater listeners guessing. He says this in place of formal dissections of his inspiration or their individual meanings: “All of these songs, except “Fierce Little Lark,” come from Palo Santo, our most recent record. Two of them are partly set in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II.” He will leave it to you sleuths to figure out just which two those are. “Fierce Little Lark” made us shiver when we heard him record it in the studio. The air literally took a break and got colder as he stood in that darkened room and went for it – playing a song that was still very new to him at the time. For the following four songs, we’ll give you a brief three-word description, embracing the secretive operation being undertaken by Mr. Meiberg.

Second song
Nobody (Shearwater) [3.37MB] [3213 downloads]


– original version appears on Palo Santo
Mind. Heart. Denial.

Third song
Hail Mary (Shearwater) [6.02MB] [3166 downloads]


– original version appears on Palo Santo
Black. Cloudburst. Lamb.

Fourth song
Red Sea Black Sea (Shearwater) [3.02MB] [3056 downloads]


– original version appears on Palo Santo
Floodlights. Bathing. Bodies.

Fifth song
Seventy Four Seventy Five (Shearwater) [3.14MB] [2895 downloads]


– original version appears on Palo Santo
Temperature. Hands. Night.