Fellow Hollow brings a sweet and intriguing easy listen to their new single “Alder.” It’s evident that this duo are both well-versed musicians and production wizards as the song rolls through different feels and intensities seamlessly and naturally. The piano pulls the song along while some clipped creative rhythmic elements accent the big drum kit sound. All are accompanied by a handful of both subtle and bold guitar tracking. Even the biggest and most engaging of which denies the temptation to overpower the main feel and theme of the song. The song refrains, “I said it before and I’ll say it again/the purest things will move without touching them/ in the alder grove a tree cuts the wind/ and if the bough shall break may it grow back again.” Accenting the powerful and sometimes quiet magic of the natural world around us.
“I had been reading about Mt St Helen’s and the USGS volcanologist David Johnston who died during its eruption. Somewhere there was a description of the pyroclastic flow ripping through the surrounding woods and leaving in its wake culverts, ripped from the ground, and curved around tree trunks like hot wax. I became fixated on destructive forces and the regrowth that comes after. Later I had a conversation with my friend’s grandmother who had just turned 90 and had gotten her car keys taken away. She told me she had another set of hidden keys that her kids weren’t aware of. She told me all about the farmhouse—on whose front porch we were sitting for the conversation, swinging—and about a tornado that had stormed through in the 1980s, just barely missing the house, but taking with it several big trees. For me Alder is all the balancing between those destructive and resurgent forces, or whatever else you might want to make of it,” says Willams.
