Portland, Oregon-based songwriter Casey Neill is releasing his new album “time zero land” tomorrow (July 26th) on Fluff & Gravy Records, and we’re delighted to be premiering a fairly epic cut from it: ‘The Distance Ahead’ is influenced by Richard Powers’ biocentric novel The Overstory. “It is a book that draws directly from the ancient forest protection movement of the 90s on the West Coast,” states Neill. “As someone who was deeply involved in those very protests and communities, I thought I could try my hand at a wide lens look. It’s also very much a Gen X song with lyrical nods to The Replacements and Rush’s tales of suburban isolation. At a time of climate crisis, this era of the environmental movement was sadly prescient.”
The new album follows last autumn’s Casey Neill & the Norway Rats’ “Sending Up Flares”, and includes two outtakes from those band sessions. Neill engineered the rest at his home studio and plays the lion’s share of the instruments. It’s a dreamy affair with sonic homages to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Sade, the acoustic side of Rust Never Sleeps, and the Brit-folk pioneered by Bert Jansch, Richard Thompson, and June Tabor. It’s named after the Polaroid Time-Zero Onestep SX-70 Land camera. These songs live in a similar hazy world of dream sequences culled from memories and how they relate to our present moment. The lyrics reflect this time-bending with deep dives into hitchhiking in Ireland, recollections from the front lines of the 90s timber wars in the Pacific Northwest, a song written as part of a 2012 production entitled “We Would Find Landscapes” by Mabou Mines theater company that Neill was the composer for (“Dance On Air”), and an 18th century Irish ballad that comes from the repertoire of master sean-nós singer Joe Heaney/Seosamh Ó hÉanaí of Connemara (“The Rocks of Bawn”).
Of time zero land, Neill states, “Over the past few years, memories of things that happened ages ago suddenly came rushing back. At the same time I am pretty vague on what happened in 2017. During the stretch of years where things were paused in music, I wrote all of the Norway Rats songs on Sending Up Flares, eight songs for the duo I have with fellow Minus 5 member Joe Adragna (Sadabouts), and these solo songs on time zero land. Where Sending Up Flares is sonically and thematically about forging ahead, these ones face the other direction from the places we are now to the places we’ve been.”
