Bandbox's exclusive color pressing of Every Acre is available now at bandboxrocks.com for the one-time purchase price of $29.99. The Bandbox edition, limited to 300 copies worldwide, comes with the H.C. McEntire issue of Bandbox’s signature fanzine, featuring an interview with H.C, beautiful photos and more!
PRE-ORDER: Album estimated to ship by end of August (pre-order dates are subject to change and customers will be notified accordingly)
While gathering material to be used for press and promotional purposes, I found myself having a hard time Explaining Every Acre. Reluctantly, after about ten drafts, I sent Merge the letter below. At the time it felt like a vulnerable offering—it still does. But it also has become an important part of this album’s process for me, and is sent out to music journalists alongside a streaming link. I see it now: as it underscores a surrendering that guided me from the get-go, and so I’ve shgared it below.
— H.C. McEntire, Feb 24, 2022
H.C. McEntire / re: Every Acre — July 21, 2022
For weeks I have tried to compose an intriguing and articulate synopsis of this album, something digestible and succinct. Ten pages, four restarts, but nothing was landing right. Frankly, it feels impossible to presentationally compress Every Acre into a few neat paragraphs because I’m living through its thick motions and messiness in real-time. Because the truth is: I’m still lost, staggering through the woods somewhere inside it.
Writing Every Acre was an act of survival and it is the most personal album I’ve made. It is also the most honest. And with all due respect, I want the lyrics to do the talking. That is where I walked intimately with my depression, loss, betrayal, love, impermanence, confusion. The words are where I sorted the pain. Grief doesn’t happen in a straight line – there is no quick elixir, no barometer for progress, no pace to follow – because there is no real finish line. Just forward.
What I will say is it was written in deep quarantine isolation and it presses on the importance of bearing witness, trying to get through one day at a time, doing the best you can with what you have in that moment, with one foot in front of the other. That is how I started to slowly dig below the surface – into ownership, into ancestors, into stewardship, into the delusion of power and last names and property lines. I learned that if I want to see things as they really are, if I am brave enough to accept the truth, I need to engage with the uncomfortable and unknown. Be present. Get tender. Stay curious. Keep compassionate. Choose courage. Invite the suffering to the surface and surrender what I think I need the most.
When collecting material for this album, I felt an unfamiliar inclination to leave room for unborn ideas, trusting they would reveal themselves in the studio. I came to know a calmness in allocating for emptiness. A large part of my journey to healing has manifested in the depth of my collaboration – with Missy, Luke, Casey, and Daniel; an alchemy for which I am most grateful, and most proud. Together, and together only: we made Every Acre. Sometimes the best way to understand what’s happening around you, what’s shaping inside you, is to get out of your own way. Let go of the need to name it or nurse it into what you think it ought to be. Lean into the chests of those who’ve seen you from all sides already and live in that hold for a while.
If you listen, look closely, it will all show itself to you. Houses have stories – beneath coats of paint, inside chimney flues, rosin fingerprints, cobwebs in corners. The land does too – forgotten trading paths, river stones, buried pits of Ball jars. Throughout Every Acre I said a slow goodbye to all of them. And in the end, even my beloved hound.
If you ask the full moon for the big love, you will find that new view. Everything might not always dovetail gracefully, or at all, but an unmanufactured life is worth dancing in the shadows for. If you find peace in love’s soft crook, rest inside it as long as you can. And let the clover cover your garden from time to time…sometimes the growing has to happen inside.
Land is a muse. Time is a teacher. Loss is a mentor. Pain is a healer. Nature is holy. Love is a revelator.
And some stories are not yours to tell.
Credit: Beowolf Sheehan
If naming is a form of claiming, of being claimed, how is one tethered to both the physical landscape that surrounds us, as well as our own internal emotional landscape—at times calm,at times turbulent, and ever changing? H.C. McEntire’s new album Every Acre grapples with those themes—themes that encompass grief, loss, and links to land and loved ones. And naming—claiming land, claiming self, being claimed by ancestry and heritage—permeates the hauntingly beautiful landscape that is this poignant collection of songs.
The songs straddle the line between music and poetry, often weaving back and forth between each realm. In “New View,” McEntire cites poets “Day, Ada, and Laux, Berry, and Olds”—fixtures in the world of writing, whose works are beacons of light over bleak horizons. The beginning of the song is backed by soft guitar plucks that fall on the downbeat and spangle like stars, and, throughout, guitar, bass, and drums swell together gently, mimicking ebbing and flowing tides under the moon. McEntire’s voice (at once tender and fierce) intones the truth of both giving and taking, releasing and claiming: “Bend me, break me, split me right in two. Mend me, make me—I’ll take more of you.”
Permeated by the constant heartbeat-like drums, “Shadows” develops quiet ruminations on surrender and loss—reminiscing, moving on. “Walk your way into the river...Is it fever, or surrender?” This ponderous, dreamlike song asks the question of how “to make room,” lyrics that serve as echoing foils to the familiar: “Cornmeal rising high in cast-iron pans. Cattails catching all the copperheads.” How does one make room, for self and for renewal and surrender, when it is so difficult to leave what you know behind? There is the temptation to “leave [a] place just like you found it.” Playing with slivers of descending chromatics, along with the occasional downward-stepping bass, here McEntire yearns for home, and for nesting. And there is also the reality of life—sometimes a casting off, sometimes a shrouded letting go.
Perhaps one of the more grief-stricken songs, “Rows of Clover” is a lamentation, one that touches on the loss of a “steadfast hound.” The lone piano in the beginning of the song is rhythmically hymn-like. The stark verse arrangement gradually leads to a chorus that reads like a moody exhale, swollen with lush guitar strums and a Bill Withers–esque understated soul groove. Images of nature, often in mid-growth or decay, are braided through the lyrics. The clover covers “wasted dirt.” Cedars stand guard the ravaged land, a rotting pasture. But what stands out the most is an image of being “down on your knees, clawing at the garden”—the only explicit mention of a person in the song. “It ain’t the easy kind of healing,” sings McEntire, seemingly from further and further away as her voice echoes; and healing takes time, time takes time—truths that linger painfully.
“Dovetail” is a song that tells of various women and their various gifts, their various traumas. Instrumentally, the song moves back and forth between solo piano and the addition of bass and drums under vocals. Imagistically, there are women who barrel through. There are “sober and sunkissed” women who never cuss. There are weak women, strong women, women who “[starve] for fathers.” And there are women who leave, and women who stay, who “will never want you gone.” McEntire’s gentle, trembling vibrato—harmonized in thirds in a celebratory manner—calls to mind a rejoicing psalm and shines through these images, leaving the listener cuttingly fraught with emotions—such as wonder, sadness, nostalgia—that can only arise with these juxtapositions.
Every Acre is aptly named. Gracious (and graceful) with its lilting melodies and lush harmonies, the album explores the acres of our physical and emotional homes. These songs are not just lyrics; they are more than lyric, reaching for the kind of home that we all seek: one where we can rest and lay down (or tuck away) our burdens of loss. And maybe, moving through every acre of a world that often tries to tear our sense of identity and heritage down, McEntire sheds light on what it is to be human in this life—both stingy and gracious, both hurtful and kind.
— Ina Carino
Like several of the songs on Every Acre, “Shadows” is a result of a steady and balanced assembling of instincts between me and Luke. We slowly and remotely wove together loose threads until we had something that resembled squares of cloth, eventually collecting enough of them to start stitching a quilt. He would send me instrumental voice memo recordings of chord progressions or guitar riffs—giving them funny titles we could remember, like “Boy Orbison” and “Swamp Creature”—and I would take those and start building a world around them, adding vocal melodies and establishing some structure and eventually lyrics. “Shadows” was the first of these collaborations, and it’s a great example of how Luke and I worked together on this album. I remember feeling so inspired by this pivot in our creative process: laying my guitar down for a while and responding to his unique style of fingerpicking, tones, and tempos. I reached and stretched in different and new ways, negotiating my vocal deliveries and melodic positioning with the spaces and shapes of his guitar lines.
In the choruses, I speak to myself about a particularly distinct depression and isolation I experienced during an early pandemic-inspired quarantine. Casey’s decision to try bowed parts on the stand-up bass added a fitting sustain and disdain. S.G. Goodman delivered appropriately moody harmonies and a top-notch call-and-response exchange in the bridge that mimicked the isolation-induced circular thought patterns echoing around in my head. And Daniel’s pulsating drum beat anchored us all—throbbing and resolute, but also alive and capable of unhinging everything it is holding up.
—H.C. McEntire, Jan 27, 2023
‘Dovetail’ began as a jangly, four-on-the-floor country demo I roughly recorded at home. In the studio, the band and I leaned into the twang and outlaw attitude, recorded it, and moved on to work on other songs. But something kept calling us back to reimagine this song, to look at it from a different angle. One night after a long day of tracking, Luke started playing the “Dovetail” chord progression on piano, but much more slowly. Daniel jumped behind the drums and played a simple halftime beat while I stood next to the piano and sang out into the room. We quickly recorded about a minute of the experiment onto a cell phone and went to bed. The next morning, we referenced the recording and tracked a full-band version of the song in that style—essentially, it took the form of a ballad.
This ‘classic’ arrangement offered space for a more nuanced vocal delivery; the slower pace allowed vocal lines to stretch and stand tall with emotion. The less-is-more approach created a vulnerability that felt right and also applied intention—to clearly speak, suspend, and spill out the narrative. Throughout verses, I posed the personalities of various women in juxtaposition—a way to both celebrate differences and individuation, as well as acknowledge the complexities of being in relation with a range of traumas, including my own. The pre-chorus and chorus lyrics nod to a problematic dynamic that can occur when presumptions are made about an Artist solely based on the social consumption and/or interpretations of their Art—romanticism versus reality.
—H.C. McEntire, Nov 3, 2022
Inspired by a late-night meditation under an October full moon, the lyrics for “New View” were written from a place of possibility and promise – the feeling of falling in love, affirming its realness and rawness, committing to the openness and bravery required for it to fully emerge, being willing to let it lead. It is about leaning into the notion that what you seek is seeking you and making room for its manifestation.
Musically, “New View” is the most collaborative composition on Every Acre, an album that rejoices in creative partnership – Luke, Casey, Daniel, Missy, and myself. In many ways, it is a song that wrote itself, while the tape was rolling – five bodies in a room together, each willing to offer an unfiltered view from where they were standing.
—H.C. McEntire, Nov 30, 2022
“Soft Crook” was an exercise in vulnerability and trust.
The music and structure were composed in real time, while the tape rolled on the very last day of tracking. My bandmates and I combined three different chord progressions and keys, each originating from different demos we had individually brought in. It was an experiment, one of the many examples of true collaboration that Every Acre is built upon.
At its narrative core, the lyrics expose my struggle with depression through an unfiltered lens—calling it what it is, shaking hands with it, unapologetically honoring the power of its grip. It’s a mysterious and unpredictable companion that can make walking this world feel like slogging through unforgiving fields of mud. It’s exhausting. During this specific stretch of time, only my most primitive senses seemed accessible; the stillness of observation became the earnest way forward: train whistles told me it was time for supper; daybreak ushered a procession of morning light colors—blue, violet, pink, gold; the smell of burnt rubber and snarling engines signaled a Saturday night.
Navigating the nuances of pandemic isolation while under a debilitating depression fog was the most alone I have ever felt. To embody grief honestly, to embrace its clumsy and unhinged corners—to survive—required efforts and elixirs of self-preservation. The chorus became an anthem, of sorts; a mantra for letting go of guilt in needing these things—whether medication or TV shows or other vices—to offer myself some grace.
I also wanted to capture a moment in time when I’d opened myself back up to love; a way to summon the feeling of resting deeply in my girlfriend’s arms—that safety in hold, that transfer of both white-hot surrender and soft certainty, being touched strong and gentle at the same time; when guards are down and there is peace, if only for a moment, in the quiet consent of joy. So I walked to the front porch and snapped a photo of the late afternoon sky as proof, a reminder that there is much to feel, and much to lose. That love needs to be nurtured, even if stacked with unknowns. And we need to nurture ourselves as best we can, with whatever it takes to move towards another dawn.
—H.C. McEntire, Oct 4, 2022