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Shearwater releases it's first album in five years, and it's wandering frontman shows us where he's been. In December 2016, during Shearwater's last live show, bandleader Jonathan Meiburg picked up a slip of paper from the stage a prayer request card, left behind by a church that had rented the Bowery Ballroom the night before. InchAt the time,Inch Meiburg recalls, Inchit seemed like a grim joke.Inch The thundering songs of 2015's Jet Plane and Oxbo, were filled with fears for what the United States was becoming, and the recent election had confirmed them. Meiburg held the card up to the audience, asked the heavens for the swift (and natural) death of Trump and his enablers, and tore into InchHail, Mary,Inch the howling climax of 2006's Palo Santo. After that, it was time to take a breath. Shearwater had recorded six LPs in ten years for Matador and Sub Pop, and toured the US and Europe many times; as the band drove home, Meiburg resolved to find a new approach. InchI felt hopeless,Inch he admits. InchAnd I didn't want to make hopeless music.Inch For the next five years, he stretched out in all directions. First on his mind was a book-a nonfiction epic called A Most Remarkable Creature (published by Knopf in 2021), which took him to remote corners of South America in search of the strange birds of prey called caracaras and their origins in deep time. Musically he went just as wide, staging a reconstruction of David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy for WNYC's New Sounds, issuing a set of instrumental albums on Bandcamp, and forming a new band-Loma-with Texan producer/engineer Dan Duszynski and singer Emily Cross. Loma made two dark and dreamlike albums for Sub Pop, and their self-titled debut found an admirer in Brian Eno, who collaborated with the band on the final track of their second LP, Don't Shy Away. And in 2020, Meiburg finally returned to Shearwater, setting up sh
