I’ve reached all the way back to May 31, 2024 to resurrect this sweet stunner.
Do you know Lungfish (the band, not the fish)? It took me some time and some reading to recall by flirt with the music (and art and poetry) of Daniel Higgs, a founding member of Lungfish who were formed in 1987 in Baltimore.
When Nathan Salsburg’s daughter Talya was a baby, he often sang her to sleep in a rocking chair. At one point, he remembered a song he had taught himself as a teenager: “The Evidence” by Lungfish, the Maryland band who coined a singular brand of post-punk in the 90s and 00s. Salsburg realized he could play the guitar part with one hand, singing while holding Talya in his other arm. Though the original version of “The Evidence” is only five minutes long, it’s essentially a repetitive mantra, so Salsburg could extend it as long as he wanted–10 minutes, 20 minutes, even an hour. “It was therapeutic and calming and just lovely for me,” he says. “And it worked on her.”
Eventually Nathan and Talya moved on from their ritual, but his lullaby cover stayed in his head. “I find that lullabies stick more than anything else,” he says. “Something about the liminal space between awake and asleep, and the way that they ease into the subconsciousness.” So he proposed to his fellow Louisville collaborators Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham) and Tyler Trotter that they record a version with Salsburg on guitar, Oldham singing, and Trotter adding drum machines and synths. They decided to pair it with a rendition of another Lungfish song, “Hear the Children Sing,” playing each tune for more than enough time to fill two sides of an album.
The result is the beguiling Hear the Children Sing the Evidence…
Beguiling and beautiful, as beautiful as wildflowers and sunshine. Two tracks, 19:58 and 21:06, add up to 41-minutes of sound therapy, a sonic salve for the grind.