Episode 27: Darlingside
In this episode we talk with Dave Senft and Harris Paseltiner, who, along with Don Mitchell and Auyon Mukharji, make up the Massachusetts based band Darlingside. The band recently released their fourth full length album Fish Pond Fish. We talk about how this album’s creation took some different paths than Darlingside’s previous works, some of which were planned (different approaches to group song writing) and some not so planned (the album had to be finished and mixed during quarantine). The band’s highly entertaining approach to live performance is also discussed. Also covered: knee slapping, pecking pigeons, and enthusiastic washing machines.
If Darlingside’s first album, Birds Say (2015), focused on the past through nostalgia and memory, and their second, Extralife (2018), contemplated uncertain futures, Fish Pond Fish (2020) stands firmly in the present, taking stock of what’s here and now. Fish Pond Fish is one of geology, meteorology, ornithology, astronomy and botany. Band members Dave Senft (vocals, bass), Don Mitchell (vocals, guitar, banjo), Auyon Mukharji (vocals, violin, mandolin), and Harris Paseltiner (vocals, cello, guitar) have created a natural history in song. An album that catalogues the weird nooks of our world with the same curiosity of a botanist’s time-worn field journal. We’re led through old growth forests, down to the deep sea’s ‘true blue bottom where the light ends,’ and up to a few singled-out stars that shine ‘ochre’ overhead.
The band, which saw their ten-year anniversary in May of 2020, has long been praised for their harmonies and intelligent songwriting, described by NPR as “exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop,” and which The New Yorker compared to David Crosby and the Byrds. Their dynamic presence (crowded tightly together onstage for the audience to witness four voices turn to a singular texture of sound), paired with their sharp wit and wordplay, have made them a live-performance favorite, and their songs treasures for literary and lyric-loving fans.
Releasing an album during a pandemic is hard, but here is their offering: a celebration of life, in all its impulses and foliage and circling birds. “I picked the fruit,” they sing in See You Change, “It was right / In my hand / And it came to life.” They’ve given us a look at the weird and bursting offerings our planet has drummed up over the past three billion years—from tides to starlings to gravity. Here, they sing, take this fruit, and watch it come to life.
-Ben Shattuck
