Spartan Records and Mountain Time - the solo project of singer-songwriter Chris Simpson of Mineral and The Gloria Record - are proud to announce the Friday, June 26 release of his new album titled Music For Looking Animals (pre-order). In the aftermath of the dissolution of his adored bands, Simpson took a step back from making music for the first time since his mid-teens. And it was during this period where an affinity for the music of the 1960s and '70s such as Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Harry Nilsson, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and many more, along with the freedom and expression of jazz and artists who radically followed their own vision, took root.
With additional inspiration drawn from the arenas of psychology and eastern philosophy, the beauty of the natural world, Simpson's children and wife, old Time Life books, and the self-stated immenseness of the universe,
Mountain Time has become almost more of a state-of-mind than a moniker.
Listen to the album's lead single, the lush and sunny "Rosemary, Etc." below!
Simpson had the following to share about the forthcoming album:
"To me, it's a record about surrendering to your true self by letting go of what doesn't serve you anymore. It's about sacrifice and stepping into your own life. It's about all the paradoxes that exist: the most important of which is that vulnerability is the only real source of strength."
Mountain Time, both a reference to timeliness (or lack thereof) and a childhood amongst the natural beauty of Colorado evolved from Chris Simpson's previous solo project Zookeeper as the most fitting moniker for the latest project. With the transition, while the process and approach became more autonomous, the drive and ultimate desire to create remained rooted within many of the same wells of inspiration that fueled previous incarnations of Simpson's songwriting. For Simpson, much of what his new album, Music For Looking Animals, is externalizing are larger questions embedded within the natural passing of time: What things do we hold onto? What must we let go?
While time has brought certain chapters to a close, new ones have opened: Family. School. Sobriety. Seeking. However, part of this recasting of priorities has involved the shedding of some former skins, and much of this process took place within the cathartic confines of writing Music for Looking Animals.
"I think for me, [writing] has always been an expression of seeking," he says. "Seeking to know more about myself or the world around me. Seeking to belong or understand. Just expressing myself and communicating who or what I am. What makes me more wholly myself or individual. Or what makes me more human. I think this has been the same throughout my songwriting. For me, it's the way I process being alive."
Simpson entered the studio with producer/collaborator Doug Walseth to capture the emotion of the songs within the "Leonard Cohen palette" i.e. songs bolstered with strings, horns and background singers rather than layers of electric guitars and keyboards. At the start of the recording sessions, Simpson and Walseth committed to capturing everything on an 8-track one-inch analog tape machine and forgoing the use of computers. However, as the arrangements, layering, and ideas became more complex, the initial approach became limiting. What began as a very spare folk album became much more grand, ambitious and dense. While Music For Looking Animals is an attempt at simplification, it is hardly minimal in terms of musical, lyrical and spiritual depth.
"I am completely convinced of the paradoxes that exist," says Simpson. "That love and compassion are the only answers to hate and fear. There is so much healing needed both within and without, and that starts at home, in our own hearts and lives. I know it's tempting to think that that has nothing to do with the state of the world, but I think it might be the only thing that has anything to do with the state of the world." It is this type of reflective seeking that brought Music For Looking Animals into existence, and it is this type of seeking that the album invites the listener to embark on after hitting play.
Music For Looking Animals track listing:
Rosemary, Etc.
Death Pause
Becoming All Things
Royalties
Empty Graves
Lady Of The Radiator
Foretold In G
Modern Living
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