Shelter From the Storm: Tough Old Bird’s “Harbor Song”
Tough Old Bird is an outfit from upstate New York. Heavily influenced by landscape and atmosphere, the brother duo shapes their songs to elicit visions through the layered textures of their arrangements. A distant droning harmonica, a slow plucked banjo and the building strum of an acoustic guitar. Close your eyes and get taken on a journey with Nathan and Matthew Corrigan. To a harbor in a nowhere town overlooking a Great Lake. Straddling the line between present day and somehow being locked in a time in the past, but preserved in a way that crafts endearing and beautiful qualities. This is what they capture on their upcoming release The Old Great Lakes…
Nathan Corrigan tells us of the new record, “Growing up in Western New York, the Great Lakes are right there, in the background, your entire life, and they can be a metaphor for almost anything. They ended up being a huge part of this new album.” Whisping winds drifting across the deep blue surface. Cresting waves crashing against rocks or a moment of peace and clarity that opens up as the storm subsides.
Corrigan continues, “With Harbor Song, I was circling around this idea that hope and desperation are almost the same thing, and sometimes it can be hard to know which is which. There’s this sense that something has to change, but not knowing how, or what. Musically, we wanted Harbor Song to capture that feeling of being on the lake when the water is getting rough – not a full-blown storm, but there might be one coming.” And it does. The horn part entering as an almost military-taps-wake up call. Like a siren warning of an oncoming storm. A slow drum trod, faint guitar and bass easing the initial jarring nature of that horn right off the bat. A really excellent choice arrangement wise to jolt folks awake and then slowly coast them into the track before the words begin to roll out…and rising and falling again like the waves of a relentless tide crashing and being pulled back into the surf.
You can feel the fog floating over the water and onto the sand, gently spraying your face with it’s mist. The swift change in pressure and cold drop into a chilly blue hue cast over the track. Gray and a bit melancholy, but gorgeous and peaceful all the same. An accordion throbbing to signify the build in tension and erupting once again. But still, there is peace living in this narrative.
And that sentiment continues on to the recording process. “We recorded it in Buffalo, in winter, and felt like Lake Erie was looking over our shoulder the entire time. We were also lucky enough to have some great musicians playing with us – Jay Corwin on bass, Marty Benzinger on drums, and our friend Sean Ebert from the Fredtown Stompers came in and added that beautiful trumpet part.”
