With a band name that reads Haunted Like Human and an album title of Tall Tales & Fables, you get a feeling this band has a mysterious and daunting musical presence. And these songsmiths certainly do: take a cup of orchestrated folk, sprinkle in some angelic harmonies, and pour in full-bodied production and you get the earthy joy of this Nashville duo.
On their new record Tall Tales & Fables (out October 15), Haunted Like Human delves deeper into inspired songwriting, sparse arrangements, and, naturally, the frisson-inducing harmonies that marked their previous two releases.
“We put a ton of emphasis on storytelling in each of our songs. We tell our own stories, we tell other people’s stories, we tell stories that we’ve seen from touring,” says Cody Clark, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Limned with nostalgia, soaked in Southern gothic lore, the duo meticulously assembles songs to preserve the spirit of the stories they tell. “When we write, we will beat a couple lines to death for two hours. In the end, it gets us to something we’re really proud of,” lead singer and lyricist Dale Chapman says.
“Ghost Towns”—out August 20–considers what happens to a place that needs to be left behind. “The song ended up playing with images both of ghost towns, empty places that used to be full of life, and a town full of ghosts, empty shells of people that essentially needed to leave this place and pass on to whatever life is next,” says Chapman. “There’s nothing left here for you now,” she repeats, a line as perfectly ambiguous as the space where ghosts live.
Glide is premiering the cinematic “Ghost Towns,” (below) which combines a Damien Rice-like heartfelt basket of musical nuances atop an atmospheric gleam.
The inspiration for “Ghost Towns” came from the lyrics for another song on the record, “Georgia”. In the first verse, the lyrics are “I never knew that ghost towns could feel quite this way, alive for everybody else but I feel empty just the same”. To me, the place felt like a ghost town because I had outgrown it in a way. I had changed so much from the person that I was when I belonged to that place, and it got me thinking about people who grow and change but refuse to shed the things that need to be left behind, be it people or places or actions. The song ended up playing with images both of ghost towns, empty places that used to be full of life, and a town full of ghosts, empty shells of people that essentially needed to leave this place and pass on to whatever life is next.
