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Ben Nichols, frontman and songwriter for the long-running Memphis rock band Lucero, released the new single and music video, “The Darkness Sings,” a twangy slow burner laced with haunting electric guitar flourishes that reflects on the quiet, inescapable presence of darkness. It’s the latest single from Nichol’s sophomore solo album In the Heart of the Mountain out on July 25 via Lucero’s label Liberty & Lament. The album is one of his most personal pieces of work to date and marks his first solo release in 16 years since 2009’s acclaimed The Last Pale Light in the West.
“‘The Darkness Sings’ was an unfinished outtake from the Last Wolf in the Woods synth record I made with my stepdaughter Joslyn Milburn,” says Nichols. “That record was about a daughter saving her father from the darkness that surrounded him. This song is about a loved one having to say goodbye. The ‘Darkness’ in this version of the song isn’t necessarily portrayed as bad or good but it is there and it must be reckoned with.”
Although not a concept album like his debut solo record, The Last Pale Light in the West, the song titles of In the Heart of the Mountain read as a poem in sequence.
In the heart of the mountain
The darkness sings
A bleak overture
From a western or a war movie
While the stars disappear
Fading back into the night
I’m in over my head
She’s starlight in the river
The prayer
The swamper’s lament
The devil takes his leave
“A few years ago, a stranger mailed me a copy of What About This, Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. He sent it because he knew I was from Arkansas and Stanford had lived and died in Arkansas and he thought my lyrics shared something in common with those poems. Even at the age of 50, I’ve never read much poetry, but there was something about Stanford’s writing I fell in love with. There was something alive and dangerous in his words. Nothing safe about the way he wrote. Soaked in Southern tones but not backwards, more unconventional and pushing at the edges of Southern decorum. It was mythology and everyday life, it was an exotic landscape and it was home. It was not quite like anything I’d read before.
Frank Stanford’s poems made me want to write in a style I’d never written in before. I’m not sure if I actually achieved that, but I ended up creating my own everyday-life-mythology of where I was from. I also ended up writing some of my favorite lyrics in years. I had a handful of guitar parts that I was holding back from the band. They were acoustic-based and had a quieter feel to them and I wasn’t ready to turn them into Lucero songs. In my head I was hearing different instrumentation and a different approach than what the band usually does. And I had these new lyrics I was working on. Before I knew it, I’d written an album’s worth of songs and fashioned the song titles into a poem unworthy of Frank Stanford but still inspired by him.”
In the Heart of the Mountain features Nichols on acoustic guitar and vocals, as well as occasional electric guitar solo and percussion. He is accompanied by Morgan Eve Swain (The Huntress and the Holder of Hands, The Devil Makes Three, Brown Bird) on violin and backing vocals, Cory Branan on electric and acoustic guitars, and Todd Beene (Chuck Ragan, Glossary) on pedal steel and electric guitars. It was recorded at Southern Grooves studio in Memphis, Tennessee with Matt Ross-Spang as the recording and mixing engineer.
“I’d say In the Heart of the Mountain is the closest I’ve come to making an album completely on my own terms,” Nichols reflects. “I had help from a great engineer and great friends who also happened to be amazing studio musicians, but it was self produced. I wrote it without input from anyone else. There were no band members to negotiate parts and approaches with. It wasn’t based on a novel or a theme. The only inspiration was that desire to create something that lived in my memories of those rivers, fields, and mountains, in that mythological Arkansas my family called home, where I grew up. I haven’t been able to get back there nearly as often as I would like.”
