Drag City have announced Murmurs & Whispers (1 September 2023), the first proper album from P.G. Six since 2011’s Starry Mind. Just as Pat Gubler changed gear on Starry Mind, shifting from his early acoustic music to a more psychedelic electric heft, ‘Murmurs & Whispers’ finds him returning to his bucolic salad days of playing Triplett Celtic harp which he also played on his 2001 ‘free folk’ debut Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites, including a beautiful cover of Anne Briggs‘s ‘Go Your Way’; the album was reissued and expanded last year.
The lead single from Murmurs and Whispers is ‘I Have Known Love‘, which has a powerfully moving chorus: “There is no fight left in me now”; it’s a remarkably heartfelt and transcendent listen and our Song of the Day.
Drag City tell us: After the previous P.G. albums of electric band arrangements, Pat found himself in a familiar place of quiet and solitude. He took on a lot of Murmurs & Whispers himself, adding guitar, bass, keyboards, recorder and hurdy gurdy, in addition to harp and vocals. Clark Griffin and Wednesday Knudson, whom Pat plays with in Weeping Bong Band, played and sang a bit themselves, and the record was recorded piece by piece in houses around upstate New York with Mike “The Mighty Flashlight” Fellows acting as producer.
Returning to the deep acoustic focus of the first couple of P.G. Six albums, Murmurs & Whispers is more straightforward in expressing its vision of rural celestial wonder. Bucolic and comfortably lived in, Murmurs & Whispers nonetheless projects the transcendent heart of P.G. Six once again, and as ever, it is magnificent to hear it passing through us.
Murmurs and Whispers is released on 1 September 2023 via Drag City.