When I arrived in Mars Hill, North Carolina late on the evening of July 9th, 2022, I drove through the thickest fog I have ever seen. I had been on the road all day, driving straight through from Vermont with a cooler of non-alcoholic beers and a stack of burned 90s hip hop albums on the passenger seat. When the fog descended over I-26, I turned down Diamond D’s dusty breakbeats and blinked hard to muster whatever reserves of consciousness I could. My headlights barely cut through to illuminate a few feet of road in front of me as I crawled along. Occasionally I would pass another car pulled off onto the shoulder with hazards flashing, its driver wisely willing—unlike me—to pay this atmospheric phenomenon its due deference. Only once before in my life did I recall encountering a fog so totally enshrouding: in Germany’s Black Forest when I was fourteen and traveling with my family. In both instances, I immediately understood how a place could feel enchanted. In obscurity, one also encounters possibility; with the visible, knowable world so contracted, the capacity to imagine becomes a necessary navigational tool.

“Along About Sundown” was conceived, rehearsed, and recorded in the six days following my encounter with the fog. Spree creativity (the mode that has defined many of our recent projects) has the effect—at least in my perception—of tethering its artistic product to a specific time, place, and conjuncture of personal circumstances; it is a process permeable to the forces and intensities around it, becoming haunted in its own right.

Mars Hill is not the first enchanted place that has featured prominently in a Grant Wallace Band record. In 2016, we recorded a triptych of “halfway” songs: Greensburg, KS; Harrison, OH; Ipswich, MA. In 2017, we mythicized a geography of the Battenkill River valley. In 2019, we haunted a house in Asheville on the Fourth of July while the bombs burst in air. This time, there were many ghosts making music with us. There was the ghost of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the legendary performer and preserver of American folk song who lived in Mars Hill, and whose music has been an enduring inspiration to the band. There were the mycelial, strigine, and corvine spirits of the forest. There were the ghosts of our younger selves singing along in “Four and Seven Crows,” a song we had first rehearsed and performed eleven years earlier in Chicago. And there were the multitudes of people both departed and yet unarrived swirling around through every strum and strain.

A concentrated moment of creativity is a thick moment frozen in time with its own irreducible particularity. When occupying a present so vivid, the past and future recede like that mountain road immersed in fog—back away from a knowable and dispiriting certainty, into that realm of imaginative possibility.

Chris Fisher-Lochhead
January 2023