For her latest album, Ghosts In The Garden, Kris Delmhorst has adopted a more atmospheric and, at times, cinematic approach to her music while still rooted in her familiar folk-Americana, enlisting an array of stellar vocal talent on harmonies, Taylor Ashton, Anais Mitchell, Ana Egge, Jabe Beyer Rachel Baiman, Rose Cousins and Jeffrey Foucault. As the title suggests, the harmonies interweaving, there’s a strong theme of grief and loss and the way it shapes who we are permeating the songs, the album’s opener, Summer’s Growing Old, with its thrumming soundscape, muted drum beats and her ethereal vocals conjuring images of things passing and hints of mortality (“something in the air like a hinge is turning/corner of your eye like a shadow thrown/anyone you’ve ever been is coming back again“).
Mortality is also at the heart of the whisperingly wistful, steadily strummed Wolves, with death personified as “wolves circling the fire… with their yellow eyes/little bit closer every night“) but with an acceptance that this is all part of the inevitable cycle of life (“there’s no wrong, there’s no blame, they’re wolves“) and needs to be accepted as such (“look em in the eye like some kinda friend“) how you can’t “really love the story if you don’t love the end“.
Carried by organ and pedal steel and again with the combined ensemble harmonies, the title track is a gathering of spirits, memories perhaps, in the kitchen, on the highway, at a bar, in the music of records, coming together as the door between worlds opens (“feel the edges disappear/you can fall right into the night“), recalling what was and, suggesting the possible passing of a parent or mentor in the lyric, “trying to do everything we learned from you“.
After these three melancholic and quiet numbers, Won’t Be Long kicks up the dust with its chiming Rickenbacker intro, pedal steel and driving drums, and as she asks, “are you the match or the kerosene, are you the head or the guillotine” a commentary on the impulse to self-destruction (“well we always knew we’d probably crash/never ever ever letting up on the gas/buckle up baby, I think we might be hitting the wall… because …we always wanted a little more, little more, little more of everything“).
After that burst of energy, Tivel on harmony, it calms down again with the Farfisa-backed soulful slow-walking conversational tone of Not The Only One which returns to melancholia with a song about a commonality of disappointments (“you watching the bus leave without you/you letting your coffee get cold…you walking by your old apartment/you reading the name by the bell …you picking up the phone and putting down the phone and picking up the phone all night … you’re not the only one here with a broken heart“).
Equally slow-paced, her voice like a meld of smoke and crushed velvet, Foucault on harmonies, there’s a brooding Wicked Game feel to the aching pedal steel and meditative guitar of the shuffling Detour which, referencing Cardwell 359, a Montana highway, is another number about a vanished past in sketching a former gold mining community that is now a ghost town, a likely specific nod to Elkhorn.
Counted in, featuring upright bass and Egge on harmonies, one of the album’s particular highlights is the flowing melody and vocal croon of the reflective Age Of Innocence, a surely pandemic-inspired “don’t know what you got until it’s gone” number that again speaks of humankind’s predilection for self-destruction in the pursuit of progress as she sings “once we were innocent and unashamed now we’re the only ones to blame/we didn’t even know we were living in the garden of Eden/express lane towards the fall/hellbent to lose it all/don’t you wish we could’ve stalled/even for one more day/but we just had to ask the question/give in to our obsession/perpetrate the big transgression and throw it all away“.
Loss is also at the heart of the Southern country soul ambience of Lucky River, Mitchell singing harmonies on a snapshot of a man left homeless by fate and fortune (“I been moving along I been sleeping rough/a little here and there but it’s never enough…had a little place by the package store, it’s not my place anymore, wasn’t much but suited me fine“) who is now “every single day a little further behind“, becoming invisible and spending his time fishing without any sense of purpose (“I caught a little fish and I let him go“), wonderfully capturing the despondency in her line “I thought I wanted April but I guess I wanted May“.
Another standout, Ashton duetting and steeped in pedal steel, the slow waltzing Beyond The Boundaries takes a familiar traditional folk song route of ill-fated lovers (“she said you are a soldier bound for the front lines and I’m bound to a man who is no friend of mine/well doesn’t it feel like a terrible crime to be prisoners to the boundaries of space and of time“), sharing one night before being torn apart by their bound duties.
Another musically upbeat track, Dematerialize, is about trying to find a connection in a seeming void (“I sent a signal into the black just to hear a human echo coming back“) that actually unfolds as a love song (“now the world’s a different hue since the day my heart got drunk on you/I fly away when I least expect it“) about seizing the time we have (“any old day I might be up and gone so tired of the apocalyptic grind, let’s find a space to occupy, point a finger, close your eyes, let’s make a world we recognize and fly away“).
Cousins on vocals and Farfisa and muted drums again the musical bedrock, it ends with the bluesy, dreamily otherworldly feel of Something To Show, which digs into that sense of cosmic insignificance (“we’re floating in a fragile crystal ball/is this what it’s like to be the stars, the stars, the stars, the stars, the stars, the stars, the stars all alone, all together, in the dark“) and the need to find meaning as to who we are (“give me something to show…for all my sleepless nights …all my years awake“).
For all the sense of loss and being alone in the wilderness, disconnected and irrelevant in land of grief and ghosts, ultimately, Delmhorst has made is an entrancing album not about isolation and emptiness but, as she sings on the title track, how “everyone’s here/no one’s gone”.
Ghosts in the Garden (7th March 2025) Kris Delmhorst / Big Bean Music
Bandcamp: https://krisdelmhorst.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts-in-the-garden
