"The fire in the rearview is smaller the further we get," Andy Hull sings near the end of his band Manchester Orchestra's new project What a way to sum up the march of time in the wake of staggering loss — the inferno burns as bright as ever, but you've pushed yourself past it.
Of course, music about grief is manifold, but Manchester Orchestra's dispatch in this department feels more believable than many.
The Valley of Vision, which arrived in April, is a brisk 25-minute project, but it's capacious and majestic, implying a vast panorama of feeling through sheer negative space. Electric guitar fuzz, prevalent in their past work, has been dialed back to almost zero; tunes like "Capital Karma," "Quietly" and the aforementioned closer "Rear View" seem to hover in orbit.
"I wouldn't say it's a light listen, but it is certainly supposed to feel like you're floating and in this place of calmness and acceptance and meditation," Hull tells GRAMMY.com. "This was like, How do we still have the same dynamics of our band, but really take away everything we've used before?"
Manchester Orchestra may have consciously stripped back elements of their sound, but they've augmented their approach in other arenas.
Specifically, they released a full-length film to accompany The Valley of Vision, directed by Isaac Dietz. In the stunning film, indoor scenes and natural scenery commingle in dramatic shots, making thunderous statements in and of themselves; the camera lingers for gravitas.
Let the Valley of Vision film whet your thirst for the Manchester Orchestra live experience proper; they're headed on a North American co-headlining tour with Jimmy Eat World that begins on July 11 and stretches into late August.
Read on for an interview with Hull about the genesis of The Valley of Vision — which was named for a Puritan prayer book of anonymous origin — and how the project is a "bridge to where we're going next as a band."
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Tell me how you became aware of VR as a viable storytelling tool, and decided to incorporate it into your artistic expressions with Manchester Orchestra.
Probably like everybody else, we were in a studio and somebody brought one in. We were shooting aliens and getting sick to our stomachs, not having our balance and trying to sort it out.
The initial idea, though, came during [our previous album, 2021's] The Million Masks of God. I felt everybody was so starved to have an event, and something to do, and needed to be taken out of reality, in a sense. So, I had this idea that maybe we'll have a cool visualizer for that album. That people can go into record stores and experience it and not have any distractions.
Obviously, that wasn't a great idea — to be sharing headsets during that period of time — so we shelved it and gave it more time to incubate. It became a bigger story as we started working on The Valley of Vision. I made friends with Isaac Deitz, and he and I both wanted to make a movie that was connected with an album.
The more [Deitz] got into it and started to figure out how to do it, and the tricks that we could do, it ended up just being a really cool 2D film, just because it's shot with this really interesting camera.
I'm a huge fan of technology in general, in any form. I think all musical instruments are a form of technology, so it's a love/hate thing. So, I was trying to find an interesting way that people could hear the record.
The film looks stunning even on YouTube. Can you tell me how you executed it on a storytelling, aesthetic and technical level?
Well, it was definitely the mission to make something that didn't have a hyper-narrative to it, but still had something that was flowing through it. Because you run the risk of the movie distracting from the music, or the music distracting from the movie.
The discussions were like, "Is this a story, and are there people in it?" And the more we thought about it, it was like, We also don't just want it to be a screensaver. We want it to be something a little bit more intense and deep than that.
So, what you're seeing is really interesting. Why it looks so different is the frame rate, first of all, but [also] what this camera is able to capture as far as width, and the information that it can take and then present on screen is just larger and wider than a typical 2D camera.
The reason we love Isaac is because he really cares about what he does in a deep way. That dude just basically took off for a year and found the weirdest spots across the country and started filming at all hours of the night.
He started to put together, essentially, the story, that's about family. It's represented in a series of really interesting-looking trees.
What were the locations involved?
There's a couple in Colorado, there's a couple in Oklahoma. A lot of it's in Georgia, in our backyard. If you're ever been to Georgia, it's an incredibly green state. When you fly in, you're flying into the forest, so we thought it would be cool to nod to the forests of George as well.
To rewind a little bit, can you tell me how the specter of grief came into your lives via your guitarst Robert McDowell's father.
Rob's dad is not just Rob's dad; he's a really, really big, impactful figure in my life — in all of our lives. He supported our band from day one.
When I was playing coffee shops for four hours for 20 bucks, he was the guy who would encourage me on my breaks: "That song's really cool, and you should try doing more of that." I'd never tell him that I was covering a Damian Jurado song; I just acted like that s— was mine. But he recognized that I had something, or felt that I had something.
Robert and I have been making records since Rob was 13 and I was 16, and he had a studio in his basement. So, when he died of cancer at such a young age, and after such a long battle, it was impossible not to write about it. It was also impossible to write about it in a lot of ways, so it was a really delicate thing.
What a pivot point for the band. He was foundational from the beginning.
I've been writing about Robert's dad since [2017's] A Black Mile to the Surface, because he was sick for such a long time. Narratively, the album is connected to The Million Masks and The Black Mile; all three are part of the story, and the story's not done yet.
How did this resonate with the title of the Puritan prayer book you found?
This book that the album is titled off is called The Valley of Vision. It's this book of prayers my mom gave me for Christmas one year, and I kind of thumbed through it here or there.
But an interesting thing about these Puritan prayers: it's uncredited; we don't know who wrote them. But it is the destruction of ego and the falling on your face and I need help. I'm asking for help. I'm not ashamed to say that I need help. It just felt like, Man, that's exactly sort of what this is saying.
Rob's my best friend; he understands how I process things. So, it was making this record actively while his dad's dying, and then his dad did pass. His dad is on the cover of A Million Masks. That is his silhouette, walking into the great beyond.
*Manchester Orchestra. Photo: Shervin Lainez*
Take me through the next part of the story.
So, that happens in 2019. We make that record, and continue to work on it throughout the next year.
I don't want to say in any way that it is easier, but I think that the way you look at grief after time is different than the raw emotion that it is immediately. There was a bit of a calmness — still incredibly sad, but like I said, less of a raw nerve and more kind of acceptance of it. We watched Rob go through that, and all of us just figured out what that looks like.
I think this record represents that in tone, lyrics and storytelling. It really serves as a bridge to where we're going next as a band. It was essential for us to make this album in order to start making other stuff after it.
**As a musician myself, I know that no artistic work can be boiled down to just one theme or feeling — in this case, grief. Music has to be a salable thing, with a quick bite of a concept. So what else was floating around in the ether that you guys picked up on?**
Musically, it was about trying to continue to do the wrong thing, and put things where we wouldn't normally put them.
Try things we normally wouldn't try. Delete things that we normally would think are important in a song, and then start basing a song around maybe the seventh idea that we added onto something and deleting the first six and starting over from that sense.
Thematically, it was a really healing process. It felt really rewarding to put something out into the world that has been, as far as I can tell, really well-received by folks.
Manchester's always dealt in these themes, and sometimes the ending isn't always happy or tied up in a bow. But it did feel really great to commit to like, No, man, let's put something into the world that deals with this stuff that everybody [deals with].
We are not the only people who deal with these themes, but hopefully that could help some folks. A lot of time, music's medicine. So, for us, it was medicine — the creation of it. We hope that that same feeling of medicinal value for the soul, heart —or whatever it is — is translated to the listener.
What foundational albums give you that sense of refuge?
My favorite songwriter of all time is John K. Samson, who was the lead singer of a band called the Weakerthans. He has two solo albums that do that for me. They make me cry, just the way he says a sentence describing an abandoned army surplus store, and that kind of feeling.
I love words. So that would be not really genre-wise, but that's always one for me.
Music-wise, it was definitely a record that was influenced by newer, interesting, sort of off the wall hip hop records, kind of focusing in on substance and drums that weren't really normal for us to use.
I really try not to listen to a lot of music that sounds like anything we are doing while we're making something. It's especially hard when something comes out from someone I really love; I have to wait until I'm done making it in order to listen to it, because I don't want to start stealing from it, because I know I would. Or, I don't want it to change my direction of what I'm going for sonically.
The Valley of Vision feels soothing and panoramic, like a big hug. Aurally, how did you want it to leap out of the speakers and impact the listener?
It's about openness, I think. When you write things and record things, you leave a ton of space. It's a hard thing to do instinctually, because in my youth, it was like, Well, how does it get bigger? You just add more stuff to it; you turn it up. You think that's what loudness is.
So, this was like, How do we still have the same dynamics of our band, but really take away everything we've used before? There is not a distorted electric guitar on this record other than maybe one time — that's on "Quietly," and a little bit at the end of "Rear View."
When it's so open like that, and your foundation is vibey immediately, then you can really nerd out and start to just place things like tiny little Easter eggs everywhere. It's definitely a headphones album where there are just things that are popping up everywhere. I love records like that.
**Such as?
I love the Kid As and Yankee Hotel Foxtrots and Grandaddy's Someday* and *Sophtware Slump records. Just these interesting albums that have great songs, but also just a ton of wacky, weird stuff going on.
I love what you said: it's a big hug. That's what we were going for — not making it too muddy, and letting the song speak for itself.
"Rear View," the last track on the record — that was a folk song that was written and a dropped tuned acoustic and had a folk swing to it. We loved that song, but it just was boring, just the way that I was playing.
It was just a live take, and we sat on it forever and tried to change the guitar out, and tried to do this, and tried to do that.
Finally, it was stumbling upon a Prophet patch on the keys. Then, we deleted everything else that we had done, started from scratch with that vocal, and started building a cinematic scene around it.
While a good magician never reveals their secrets, you mentioned those Easter eggs, which I live for. Anything you'd like to shout out that might not be immediately perceptible?
There's a really cool moment where my son, River, is yelling in "The Way."
I haven't seen anybody pick this up yet, but it's the same yell from a song called "No Rule" that we released last year. There's this call and response from my son yelling, and then an immediate, loud, thunderous voice responds to him. It's actually our drummer, Tim [Very]. There's stuff like that everywhere.
Back to Robert's father: you lost a pivotal figure as Manchester Orchestra is about to turn 20. That's bound to kick up some feelings.
That's insane. I don't know how that happened.
I just feel really, really grateful that I am still deeply engaged and trying to get better and don't feel we've really scratched the surface of what we can achieve and do. I'm really, really fortunate that the band is so tight as they are now, and every member is deeply trusting of each other and open.
When you have people who are talented and good at their jobs and also take that ego and put it aside — myself included — it's the thing I wish we would've learned from day one.
But you can't learn it until you fail at it. You don't have to be right. Let's all work in service of the song and the album not in service of ourselves or our ideas. Who cares whose idea it is? It really doesn't matter as long as it's right for the song. So, I feel great about that.
As long as I'm around, I want to be working on a Manchester record the week before I move on to the next thing, as far as life and dying. I want this to be a long, long story that we're telling with this band — and feeling that's possible is really exciting.
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