I think that comes after not giving a shit what anyone else thinks about it. I think it becomes the story of anyone willing to let the emotional tone in. But I think because it's open and it's not told in a way where the listener is not encouraged to be voyeuristic, but they're encouraged to invest their own life and experience into the music. It's not a single song… could be touching on ten or 12 different moments in my life. Your past solo work has been so spare, so I'd think the storytelling happening on the album would be so important. ![]() He helped me feel very comfortable, and helped bring it all out. It really felt very organic, very natural. And becoming better at some of the things I'm strong at. ![]() It feels very different, like I'm taking what I've learned in all my music-making previous and pushing myself in some ways and some new territory. And I think it's my strongest material to date for sure. And it really hit me-the importance of it to me. Not just of the time since the last album, but of my entire life and the entire journey. I realized that after I put this one together and I was hearing it back, it was extremely reflective-self-reflective. And all the influences of the physical world and the spirit world all kind of jumbled up in there. It's not that kind of music - it's more like abstract snippets of my life and my way of viewing the world and the natural world around me. ![]() And others were quite recent.įor me, it's a really heavy album. I don't really have a good sense of time, like when people say it's been seven years I'm like, "What?! No." Some of the ideas have been around since not long after the last one came out. Steve Von Till: It's always cooking in the back of my mind. What's gone into the process of putting that together? Noisey: It's been seven years since your last solo record. ![]() We got on the phone on a chilly Sunday evening to talk about the "rural psychedelia" sound of his new record, but meandered into a conversation about how he fits into the Idaho culture, dragging corpses off a mountainside and realizing your infinitesimal place in the universe. It's spare at the start, and transcends into something cerebral and haunting. A Life Unto Itself combines the complex acid-trip of Harvestman with the piledriving thick of Neurosis guitars, and Von Till's own past solo stuff: a gothic take on Celtic and folk music. It's an album that drives home Von Till's unique brand of "rural psychedelia," and, in some ways, shows everything the man is capable of. Most recently, he's added a new album to his self-titled project discography: a solo record called A Life Unto Itself, which drops on May 5. Today, he runs the Neurot Recordings label, works as a schoolteacher, jets out of town on the weekend to write with Neurosis (he says they're working on a new record), and carves out new psychedelic sounds in his backyard studio as a part of his solo project Harvestman. But it is here, in dark forests of the Gem State, where the steely-eyed Neurosis guitarist and singer continues the unabashed DIY lifestyle he started for himself in the Bay Area 30 years ago. People come to escape, to disappear, to surrender to nature and space and quiet and find themselves in the cracks in between.įor more than a decade, this is the place Steve Von Till has called home.
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