Little Mazarn Album Release Show with special guest Will Johnson
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 ten-song collection continues work with Dear Life Records. 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, mix with unexpected bombastic drums, dissonant synthesizers, and a chorus of orchestral oddities. 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.
The band’s crossroads branch across prominent Southern outsider music: On cello, Lindsey has recorded with Patty Griffin and Dana Falconberry. Jeff has played in Bill Callahan’s band, as well as with Li’l Cap'n Travis and Orange Mothers. Carolina is known for prolific solo project hemlock. Little Mazarn has also collaborated with Lomelda to release their last EP, Honey Island General Store (2023), following past LPs Texas River Song (2022) and Io (2019).
Alongside silliness and reverence, including covers from Kate Wolf and Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, grief directs much of Mustang Island. Lindsey left her job of seventeen years teaching cello at a local school. Recording also aligned with the passing of Jeff’s father, a career educator in Jeff and Lindsey’s hometown of Dallas.
“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 literally grieve that it was so good. If you really 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.’” -Rachel Rascoe
‘The music of Little Mazarn is a cool float a few feet from the ground through a dimly lit, almost familiar forest. It is quieter than silence, big as everything, still but always moving. If you’ve ever had flying dreams, or an amazing night time bike ride on LSD, this might be a world for you. Chords are made up of notes; Little Mazarn gives them all their own moment. There are NO superfluous notes played here. Lindsey’s kind and twisting voice ambles along over the spare sounds of Jeff Johnston’s saw bowing, Ralph White’s electric mbira wanderings, and her own slow banjo. Like DJ Screw, Bohren & Der Club of Gore, and anyone who chooses to walk instead of ride, Lindsey realizes the amazing power of slow… slow… slow music. Lindsey is at once a baby and a wise old man. Get in this canoe at dawn on some Texas river that remembers when Comanche slept under the stars.’—Thor Harris, Talkhouse
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Will Johnson’s newest, No Ordinary Crown, hums with palpable motion. Travelers, runners and conductors fill its lyrics, and gesticulating storms and emotional highs and lows seep through the instinctual quality of its rock ’n roll performances.
The songs were conceived in stolen moments and brief windows of time between the responsibilities of family and a multi-hyphenate career. The singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, painter and novelist describes the demo process as “fairly jagged,” a gathering and stitching of audio snippets recorded via cell phone and dictaphone over a year and half. “I finalized the songs on short tours where I could hear my thoughts a bit more clearly,” he says.
For “The Conductor Calls,” the album’s sixth track, a sonic buckshot imbued with pedal steel and wise couplets, that meant crawling into the back of a Prius in a hotel parking lot in Columbus, Ohio. “The lyrics spilled out quickly; I knew I had to document it and not tweak it too much because it felt so natural,” he recalls.
The musician Ben Kweller, in a 2012 interview, summoned three words to describe Johnson: Always make art. It’s a sentiment that stands today. “I’m at an age where I can see back down the road, where I’ve been, but I can also see up the road, where I’m going,” Johnson explains. “What I’ve learned is I can grip the thing I’m obsessing over — a record, a painting or a book — and damn near smother it. Or I can open my hand a little and free it, and know the work is better for it.”
The perspective was key to the No Ordinary Crown recording sessions, which took place over five quick days in April 2022. He recruited trusted producer Britton Beisenherz of Ramble Creek in Austin, who tracked Johnson’s last four records including El Capitán (2020) and Wire Mountain (2019). For the band, he gathered a coterie of friends he says he “trusts with his life” — Lindsey Verrill of Little Mazarn (banjo, cello, backing vocals), Rob Sanchez (drums) and Ricky Ray Jackson (pedal steel, guitar).
The familiar setting and familial spirit meant that trust was implicit and the performances were nearly spontaneous, each song conveying the magic that comes with very few takes. After texting the group “raw skeletal demos,” Johnson says he left much of the sonic choices to the players. “It was like managing the ’27 Yankees; the team’s ridiculously good and I wanted their fingerprints on the record just as clear as my own.”
There may be no better example of this communal spirit than on the title track, “Along the Runner (No Ordinary Crown),” a charging blend of hard and soft, with Verrill’s preternatural atmospherics pulsating the negative space between electric guitar and drums. Johnson, his Mid-South rasp never stronger or more assured, conveys through his lyrics that even the most imperceptible victory can be extraordinary. “In America there’s the opportunity for everyone to be the king of some kind of hill, whether you’re an NFL champion or you’ve won the watermelon seed-spitting contest in Missouri,” he explains. “The crowns are unusual and there is reward in the strangest of pursuits.”
For more than three decades, Johnson has been a steady, prolific presence in the Texas music scene. In 1991, he broke out with alternative rock band Funland, and was the leader of beloved indie-rock act Centro-matic and alt-country outfit South San Gabriel. He’s also worked with Jason Molina, David Bazan, Matt and Bubba Kadane, Vic Chesnutt, Mark Eitzel, Jim James, Jay Farrar, Bob Mould, Jason Isbell, John Moreland and many other iconic American songwriters. He makes folk art paintings centered on historical baseball figures, which have been shown in galleries across the country. In 2020, he published his debut novel, If or When I Call.
As much as Johnson reveres our nation’s iconography and folk traditions, he also doesn’t shy away from interrogating the uglier sides of the American experience. Throughout No Ordinary Crown, he chronicles unsavory tourists and the hypocrisy and blind excess of capitalist society. But he does so with the dark humor and moral resolve of the best Southern Gothic writers. “I was a high fashion wretch / Arm in arm with a blissed-out fool,” he sings on “In Granada” over twinkles of plucked guitar, a character study and composite of archetypes he observed while touring through Spain over the years.
“Somewhere along the line someone advised me to never be afraid to hurt my characters, that I will always be able to get them out of it,” he says. “I do want there to be these small victories and small portals of hope.” With No Ordinary Crown, people may behave badly, and the road may get rough, but the reward is in the journey.
