Valley Maker, the project of singer-songwriter Austin Crane, recently released his new single “Mockingbird,” which was put out via Frenchkiss Records.
The track is a smart and heartfelt piece of folk storytelling, that feels rich, vivid, and full of a sense of place and atmosphere. The track was conceived before the realities of 2020 and the pandemic set in but it still manages to resonate as a result quite powerfully, as Austin explains in the quote about the song shared below:
“I wrote ‘Mockingbird’ within a week of moving to Columbia, SC, having just left my home of seven years in Seattle to return to the area and community I grew up in. It’s a song about trying to settle in while feeling quite unsettled. My wife, Megan, and I had just bought a small, historic house that needed (still needs!) a lot of work, and wanting to do something tangible and forward looking, I planted my favorite tree in the yard: a Japanese Maple. There’s a line in the song that acknowledges how I’ll “sit for a while and watch it grow,” as a way of accepting that season of uncertainty and transition. I guess when I wrote the song, I didn’t know how long I would be doing just that. So while “Mockingbird” was written a few months before the pandemic upended life as we knew it, the song resonates deeply, for me, with this strange season of life. Both the song and video meditate on memory, time and aging; they both try to embrace the uncertainty, absurdity and beauty of life; and they reflect a feeling of being in-between places and communities
Enjoy a listen to “Mockingbird” below.
Join the conversation