Little Marzan has today released the lead track titled ‘The Gate’ from their upcoming album ‘Mustang Island’ dropping on June 20th via Dear Life Records.

The track feels personal on a memorable level. Quietly becoming you. Taking you in and caressing you with comfort and consciousness in a way only a near-perfect song can do. A beautiful set of instruments gives the song an almost heavenly atmosphere that lends the subtlety a solid voice amid the atmosphere.

The buildup throughout the song is stellar. It surprises you and causes you to listen to it again and again. The abrupt ending is the only downside. The song should be longer than it is, but, like life, it is all to short while it’s how you make it.

“‘The Gate’ was a song that came to me in a dream. I was in a profound state of grief at the time and in the dream, I was offered a solution from the heavens to deal with the constant thundering pain of it inside my chest. Simply build a gate. I woke up and started dictating the words as they came to me into my phone.”
Lindsey Verrill

About ‘Mustang Island’

Mustang Island, the third album from Austin-based band Little Mazarn, is a gentle force. Waves of grief crest like surf on the Texas coast. Wild horses break through long-shuttered gates, only to come back around. Lead songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Lindsey Verrill (she/her) joins bandmates Jeff Johnston (he/him) and Carolina Chauffe (they/them). The core members cast out seventeen years apart in both directions, placing the project at the cusp of multiple generations.

The balance of acoustic instruments and electric effects on Mustang Island also thrives firmly in the in-between. The ten-song collection continues work with Dear Life Records (MJ Lenderman, Fust). A full-throated romp through the capabilities of community-minded songcraft, Mustang Island is both naturalistic and futuristic, completely recasting Little Mazarn’s origins in primitive folk. Instead, the band reaches towards sonic experimentation and spacious expansion.

Lindsey’s heart-opening vocals and Jeff’s singing saw both trademarks of the project, mixed with unexpected bombastic drums, dissonant synthesizers, and a chorus of orchestral oddities. Shaking off any genre and geographic boundaries, Mustang Island manages to swirl its creators’ love for The Beach Boys’ melodic rock, wise Southern singer-songwriters, and never-too-much ambient minimalism. This mid-career ode dances confidently in the creative liberties granted by decades in the game – more dazzlingly lively, and honestly somber, than ever before.

“I was thinking about the pony as a metaphor for consciousness,” says Lindsey. “Trying to be gentle with yourself, but not allowing yourself to stray off into the wild fields. Whether or not your consciousness needs to be disciplined or pushed back on the trail.”

Ever evolving, Little Mazarn began in 2015 as the banjo-and-saw duo of Lindsey and Jeff, who were both raised in Dallas. You can find the group playing anywhere legends and youngsters may rub elbows, from secret house shows to indie scene stages to Wizard Rodeo, an annual music festival Lindsey helps run. The band’s crossroads branch across prominent Texas outsider music: On cello, Lindsey has recorded on Patty Griffin’s Grammy-winning albums, Patty Griffin and Servant of Love, as well as with the band Dana Falconberry for seven years. The longtime side player wouldn’t write her first song until age 34. Jeff has played in Bill Callahan’s band, as well as with Li’l Cap’n Travis and Orange Mothers. Carolina, known for their prolific solo project Hemlock, enfolds their background from Louisiana Cajun country.

Little Mazarn has also collaborated with Lomelda to release their last EP, Honey Island General Store (2023), following past LP’s Texas River Song (2022) and Io (2019). Mustang Island was recorded at South Austin’s Ramble Creek Studios, a steady home for Little Mazarn’s improvisational assemblies. The only rule? No guitars.

“We were trying to be wild, or do something that you would never do,” says Lindsey. “On other albums, I was thinking how these songs have to be performable live. This time, I just didn’t worry about that. We did add some banjo and some of Jeff’s classic elements, but it was a lot less, ‘This has to sound like Little Mazarn.’”

Lindsey might arrive early with a seed of a song, like the title track’s electric bassline, ripe for listing what she loves about the “bathwater warm” Gulf Coast. Alongside her bowed banjo and thrift store Casio, Jeff might pull out a stylophone, Taishōgoto, or melody flute. Sessions are scheduled around the roaming touring of Carolina, whose choral harmonies drape each song. Track contributors include Nora Predey, Roberto Sanchez, Mari Maurice, Gary Newcomb, Sowmya Somanath, and Walter Nichols.

During the album’s creation, Lindsey left her job of seventeen years teaching cello at a local school. To commemorate the seismic shift, Lindsey invited four of her outgoing students to play on otherworldly, encouraging album sendoff “The Golden Hour.” Spare and sonorous, “Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing” further explores her clearing of a more intentional artistic path, specifically through the wacky weeds of social media. The track introduces Lindsey’s creative totem of the pony. Horses – like those belonging to the artist Jad Fair, which Lindsey helps care for – run wild throughout the album, including the ghostly centerpiece “The Gate.”

“I wrote ‘The Gate’ in an intense dream,” says Lindsey. “I was trying to reckon with how to be with grief. How do I be with this feeling that’s so overwhelming and painful? I was like, ‘You just have to let it go and know it’s gonna come back. Then you hold it, and then it leaves.’ When I woke up, I was like, ‘I’m the gate.’”

Grief, and the acceptance of it, directs much of Mustang Island. One of many curious examinations of heaviness, “The Cloud and the Snail” asks: “Does the earth feel the weight of me, the burden of my two feet? The weight of my sorrow, better tomorrow.” The recording also aligned with the passing of Jeff’s father, a career educator. As a high school English teacher in Dallas, his encouraging presence aligned with several music-making students, including Michael Martin Murphey and Ray Wylie Hubbard, as well as his son Jeff, and neighbor kids who went on to form Old 97’s.

“Grief, and the avoidance of grief, is a big part of being human,” says Lindsey. “You make a choice, and then you grieve for the other choice. Or you finish a meal and grieve that it was so good. If you befriend grief, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s here, in this pancake, which I loved so much that I ate the whole thing, and now it’s gone.’”

There are also flashes of silliness, from a “queso volcano” to a girlhood memory of galloping horseback to Dairy Queen. Continuing the band’s airy reinterpretations of old cowboy songs, the album adds another “New” to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys’ 1940 re-recording, “New San Antonio Rose.” Another cover uplifts the work of undersung songwriter Kate Wolf. Between sorrow and joy, the horizon-facing 1982 track specifies Mustang Island’s place at the precipice:

“Where the rivers change direction, across the great divide.”
Rachel Rascoe

LINKS:
https://www.littlemazarn.net/
https://littlemazarn.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/littlemazarn/
https://www.youtube.com/@DearLifeRecords
https://open.spotify.com/artist/29HDEKFQllgODYWX9zzR0j