Valley Maker
Schedule
Sun Nov 21 2021 at 10:30 pm
Location
2501 Kettner Blvd San Diego CA 92101 | San Diego, CA
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We have all become experts in the imbalance of uncertainty these days, newlyaccustomed to canceling plans and tentatively rescheduling them for some future
we can only imagine. For Austin Crane—the ruminative songwriter, riveting
guitarist, and singular voice performing and collaborating as Valley Maker—such
a sense of uncertainty has emerged as his steadfast companion these last few
years, a period of profound transition. This flux is the anchor for Crane’s
fourth and best album as Valley Maker, the gorgeous and felicitous When the Day
Leaves. Early in 2019, Crane and his wife, Megan, decided it was time to leave
Seattle. South Carolina natives, they’d been in Seattle for nearly a decade
while he pursued a doctorate in human geography at the University of Washington,
and she worked as a midwife. As Summer 2019 ended, they prepared to head east to
Columbia, SC, rejoining a deep community of friends and moving into a
century-old home in need of big love. Still, major questions loomed: Would they,
just then past 30, like it enough to stay, to start a new life? And what did it
mean to go home? Driven as it is by departure, When the Day Leaves marks the
arrival of Valley Maker as a trustworthy narrator for these shaky times. Crane
synthesizes these complex feelings into the magnetic first single, “No One Is
Missing.” A song about reckoning with self-doubt while searching for community,
“No One Is Missing” acknowledges the tension inherent in those ideas, especially
during our polarized era. The swaying “Branch I Bend” is a workaday anthem and
an ode to whatever goodness you find, to recognizing grace in a world that can
seem starved for it. All these thoughts are rendered with newfound lyrical
richness, balancing intimate tidbits with universal ambiguity. Crane raises
questions only to let them linger, shaping clouds of geographical and political
specifics and asking you to draw out the meaning. During “Mockingbird,” he sings
of moving to his Columbia home and planting a new tree, tiny details that induce
an imaginative diorama for the listener—where does life go from here? In the
months before recording began, Austin convened with producer Trevor Spencer and
longtime harmonizing partner Amy Godwin for sessions in Portland and Seattle,
teasing out the album’s interwoven arrangements and meticulous vocal harmonies.
Then, in November 2019, Crane decamped from Columbia to the Pacific Northwest
for a three-week session in the woods outside of Woodinville, a small town
northeast of Seattle at the foot of the Cascades. He stayed in the loft of
Spencer’s Way Out Studio, the collaborators sealing themselves off in a horse
barn-turned-recording space like kids at summer camp, just as winter’s mist
closed in. The time commitment is a crucial component of When the Day Leaves.
For 46 minutes, you feel like you’re sitting with Crane in an intricate, unified
sound-world of his design. He offloads his observations about our tangled
thicket of hope and fear, aspiration and exasperation. When the Day Leaves is an
uninterrupted sequence of reflections about the generational limbo of being awed
by and worried for this world. The anxiety of uncertainty—always part of life
but now seemingly omnipresent—can be vexing, a reality these songs acknowledge.
Crane, as he sings at one point, is fully “aligned with my blues.” But these
songs also affirm that life is an endless opportunity for renewal, for trying
again. As with dusk, when the day leaves and “tries to start again” amid a riot
of expiring colors, we eventually learn what comes next.
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Where is it happening?
2501 Kettner Blvd San Diego CA 92101, San Diego, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
