The Western Massachusetts musician Stephen Pierce is releasing his second album as Gold Dust, The Late Great Gold Dust, in a few weeks. He’s been pairing every new music from it with a canopy — lead single “Proof Of Life” got here with one by Karen Dalton, and he lined the Weakerthans when he put out his personal “Larks Swarm A Hawk.” Today, Kearse is again with one remaining pairing: His scratchy, pastoral “Mountain Laurel” is accompanied by his tackle Gene Clark’s “In A Misty Morning.” Check each out under.
Here is Pierce’s assertion on the monitor:
I don’t are inclined to know what the climate’s going to be till it’s occurring, simply as I don’t are inclined to know that I’m making some kind of error till all the pieces’s fucked up. In each instances, what are you able to do however attempt to make one of the best of the scenario as soon as it’s underway? After all, if it’s pouring rain, you possibly can solely get so drenched, proper?
So a lot of this document is centered on the pure world round me, usually utilizing that exterior world to convey some parable of the interior expertise, or the outer inexperience, or someplace in between or exterior that each one fully. Just past my door lies an surroundings wealthy with tiny parallels to some interior structure. For occasion, the bittersweet that’s climbing up my trellis: it’s stunning, and I’m grateful for it, however begins to strangle the lilac, which I’m additionally grateful for. So I minimize the bittersweet again, pull it out on the roots. But it’s again once more the subsequent summer time, shortly reaching once more in direction of the lilac. I’m not comfortable about any of it, but it surely’s how it’s. I’m not comfortable concerning the carpenter bees who preserve burrowing into this one a part of the wooden siding, regardless of what number of instances I seal it up, nor am I significantly thrilled concerning the woodpeckers who drill additional holes into that piece of siding to attempt to get on the bees. And that’s all simply steps from my door, for fuck’s sake.
In a approach, “Mountain Laurel” is about attempting to be at peace with what’s round you, for higher or for (extra usually) worse. It’s about a complete acceptance of the unusual ecosystem that’s the self: the nice, the unhealthy, the emails you despatched that make you cringe whenever you learn them again, the ego you’re attempting to destroy however that also reveals up now and again, the look again at a previous pockmarked with alternatives to have been higher than you ended up being, the individuals who have left, the individuals who have stayed. Those which can be gone for good. The hope that you will discover one thing to understand about who you might be proper. at. this. very. second. and look with not less than some type of gratitude again on the highway that acquired you right here, and god keen by no means should navigate that highway once more.
It will get darkish typically. You don’t all the time should have a light-weight to shine in it.
You can simply sit with the darkness and await it to move, if it’ll move.Thanks for listening, I hope you just like the music.
Stephen Pierce
The Late Great Gold Dust is out 11/4 through Centripetal Force Records.