Basically everything I’ve done in my adult life has been trying to navigate towards getting out there because I didn’t want to wait. It’s a raw piece of land, no power, no water, you know, all that stuff. I’ve been trying to live out there for fifteen years. It’s pretty primordial feeling.ĪD: You live on some land outside Lockhart, right? And you have the Spanish moss, and the springs bubbling up.
I’d seen dwarf palmettos growing native in understories, but had never seen them all grouped together like that. So yeah, maybe this is the Palmetto album. Because sometimes it’s not as striking, obviously, as being out west or being in the Hill Country, but there’s something about the feeling that I get in this part of Texas in particular that feels very homey and comforting. Kind of settling in to finding beauty in this area. and settling back down in Lockhart and taking trips to places around there, just further out east as opposed to west. But there was definitely an intention with this one that was driven by moving back from L.A. Shane Renfro: Well, in a way Trickster Blues is a Lockhart album too because we recorded it in Lockhart, but I’d kind of written that all over the place. I usually try to do a visual component that goes along with the place.ĪD: So is it fair to call this your Lockhart album? So on the new one, all the photos are from Palmetto State Park or my place in Lockhart. And all the photos, even the back cover, the weird collage stuff, they’re all 35 mm photos from out there. But that was when I started really connecting with the west and started kind of incubating ideas for Rain On Dust. And we rented a house in Marfa for a month and we ended up staying three months. Shane Renfro: We were doing demos for Trickster Blues, which is the album before Rain On Dust. But the main framework of it was definitely informed by being there and in a more swampy locale in general.ĪD: Rain On Dust always sounded like West Texas to me, with “Wild Rose Pass” and the buzzards and the snakes and the cactus and everything.ĪD: And then on this one it’s instantly apparent that there’s a different palette. And there are some songs on the album are kind of old that I resuscitated and revised a bit. Like this last one, when we went to Palmetto State Park, I was so enamored with it that I was just like, alright, this is the next album. Usually we’ll start cooking up an album based on a trip or being somewhere that’s new to me or that I’m exploring. | w furgeson Red Swan in Palmetto by RF ShannonĪquarium Drunkard: Do you think of albums or particular songs as being tied to the place that you conceived them or wrote them or recorded them?
Red swan violin Patch#
When we talked about the wild patch of land outside Lockhart that he’s been working on over the past decade-plus, Renfro mentioned that he doesn’t want to end up as “a lone man in the woods,” but it seems that these muggy, shadowy places suit him just fine. RF Shannon can still go big – the chorus on “Midnight Jewelry” alone is worth the price of admission – but there is something knottier and more enigmatic at work on Red Swan in Palmetto.
The characters inhabiting these songs are ephemeral, whether spectral as a “a disembodied spirit in the night” or fleeting and “light as a feather with an alibi,” but the album is thick with evocation of the earth, and the earthy pleasures, around them. This is sultry music, conjuring sensual glimmers in the smell of “Cedar Perfume,” the sound of rattlesnakes lurking in the bluebonnets, and that particular skin-feel of summer night air when a distant rain never arrives. John, part Brightblack Morning Light, and all humidity. Renfro’s vision is as sweeping as it was on previous albums, but a lot more gets in the way of the vistas in this part of the state. Opener “Palmetto” is a dark incantation: part Gris Gris-era Dr. The LP takes its name and some of its inspiration from the tropical micro-region of nearby Palmetto State Park, said to be the western-most naturally occurring palmetto swamp in the United States. Songwriter Shane Renfro began gestating 2019’s Rain On Dust in the far west Texas town of Marfa, and it showed. That album, RF Shannon’s third and strongest full-length up to that point, sounds as wide open as the Trans-Pecos region looks, desert-tinged folk-psych grandeur counterposing Renfro’s soft, often whisper-sung vocals. Renfro and his band, based in the central Texas town of Lockhart, have just released a very different and considerably steamier album with Red Swan in Palmetto, out digitally on Keeled Scales on May 26 with a physical release coming in the future. RF Shannon’s songs abound with references to the geography from which the music emerges, with the names of places, roads, flora and fauna adding both specificity and symbolic significance.
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