Black Prairie has teamed with author and friend Jon Mooallem to create the soundtrack to his book, Wild Ones (Penguin Press), a meditation on wildlife inhabiting the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land.
The entire album is streaming now, exclusively on Slate.com, with the song “Dear Sir. Most Sincerely, William Temple Hornaday” available for free download. (William Hornaday was a renowned taxidermist, first director of the Bronx Zoo, and a tireless member of the Victorian-era conservation movement.)
The band will be releasing ‘Wild Ones’ digitally on May 14th through their own Captain Bluegrass Records, the week the book becomes available. A limited edition of 10” clear vinyl and handpackaged CDs will be available on June 11th. Pre-orders, including 50 signed vinyl or CD + signed book packages, are available
here.
Wild Ones is described on the album art as, “a musical score for the things that you might see in your head when you reflect on certain characters and incidents that you read about in the book.”
"We talked about collaborating somehow—about the band writing a “soundtrack to the book”, writes Mooallem, for Slate. "Though, frankly, I don’t think either of us really knew what that actually meant. (The book is about quixotic human efforts to save the polar bear, the whooping crane, and an obscure butterfly.) As the band members read the book, though, they started sending me ideas for songs based on characters and scenes, and I was amazed at how the music actually recreated some of the moods and emotions I felt while reporting the book—living through those scenes and hanging out with these people."
Black Prairie US Tour Dates:
June 10 - Seattle, WA Triple Door (w/ Jon Mooallem)
June 11 - Portland, OR Powell’s City of Books (w/ Jon Mooallem)
June 16 - Manchester, TN Bonnaroo, Ed Helms’ Bluegrass Situation Stage
July 14 - Veneta, OR Oregon Country Fair
July 19 - North Plains, OR String Summit Festival
July 28 - Newport, RI Newport Folk Festival
July 29 - New York, NY City Winery (w/Michael Hurley)
Aug 16 - Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia Folk Festival
Oct 19 - Portland, OR Portland’s Indies w/ the Oregon Symphony
About Black Prairie:
Black Prairie features Chris Funk, Jenny Conlee, Nate Query and John Moen of The Decemberists, with Annalisa Tornfelt and Jon Neufeld. Their most recent LP ‘A Tear in the Eye is a Wound in the Heart,’ was released September 2012 on Sugar Hill Records to critical acclaim. They performed “Nowhere, Massachusetts” for the first time on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in March and will make their debut at both Bonnaroo and Newport Folk Festivals this summer.
“8 out of 10...fits between John Ford and David Lynch, homespun tales with sinister sub-plots.” - Uncut
