Big Harp put out their first album fifteen years ago, and it’s over a decade since their third, and what was looking increasingly like their final album Waveless. The appearance of today’s track serves to undo that assumption, and there is indeed a fourth album called Runs to Blue on its way, it’s out March 27th via Saddle Creek. Today’s song is pretty much a manifesto for the band’s return, focusing as it does on the urge to throw off domesticity and hit the road again, playing whenever and wherever there is bar that’s serving and people (hopefully) eager to listen.
Big Harp are Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney – who are also the married parents of two – and have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago. Drootin started as a teenager in the San Fernando Valley’s DIY scene, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. At 17, she sold her Volvo for a van and has spent the last quarter-century circling the world with the likes of The Good Life, Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst, Azure Ray, She & Him, and M. Ward. Senseney’s musical story starts with a mother who would lift the needle from the turntable and explain the words they’d just heard whilst his father was an old-time picker who could build instruments from most anything. When college in Omaha didn’t go as planned, he fell in with the city’s legendary scene and became an in-demand player. He met Drootin on the road in 2007. A month later, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp.
Chris Senseney says of today’s song that “It’s pretty much about what it seems like it’s about. One of our goals was to be as plainspoken as possible on this record, with any kind of lyrical tricks or wordplay in service to communication, not in the way of it. While it has a lot of details that are specific to us, I think the sentiment works for anybody who has ever felt constricted by responsibility or nostalgic for a remembered freedom, real or imagined.”
