Autumn has entered with a force equal to itself, two hurricanes ripping across the east coast of the United States, a once-in-a-lifetime election looming on the horizon, and Denver-based band A Place For Owls (made up of Ben Sooy, Nick Webber, Daniel Perez, Ryan Day, and Jesse Cowan) is releasing an album on November 1, 2024, with enough magnetism and gravity to overshadow any fear I have of the future, at least in this moment. Perhaps thanks to some divine intervention, I was given the beautiful opportunity to hear this album early and to interview A Place For Owls about the album, how we dig in the earth, and their inspirations and creative processes.
A Place For Owls released two singles from the album in preparation for its full release, “broken open seed” and “a tattoo of a candle”, both of which have found permanent homes in my Spotify library. Both of these singles are just small slivers of how we dig in the earth, both of them giving us a small, beautiful glimpse into what is yet to come. However, neither of these are my absolute favorite from this album.
My favorite track from this album is the eighth track, “haunted”, a song that cannot be fully described by words, but I will try my best. This song is driven by a beautiful riff, the soft vocals like a hug for your brain. A sweet and soft horn sound comes in just before the drums pick up, leading in to the beautiful latter half of the track, an electric guitar driving it home and nailing you in the heart. This track is a monument to life after grief, life in the after of anything, continuing on even if it feels like your feet are nailed to the floor. In moments where it feels like my own grief is insurmountable, how we dig in the earth reminds me that we all carry some sort of grief, some of us holding it for the entirety of our lives – we don’t grieve alone, we never grieve alone.
Another favorite track of mine is the tenth, “no plans on saturday”, which opens with soft vocals and soft guitar that then explodes into beautiful riffs, chords, and percussion. Like everything else in this album and that A Place For Owls has released, thought-provoking and meaningful lyricism is showcased in the tenth track. With this track, I feel as though my heart is learning to speak, as though my throat is closing up and my heart and muscles and blood are singing for the first time. I am held in this sound, I am seen and known, I am stronger than yesterday. The tenth track of this album is something to treasure, something to hold close to you, it’s a warm cup of chai tea when October finally gets chilly and the leaves begin to fall. Hold it close.
In preparation for the release of this album, I interviewed A Place For Owls, which was as insightful as I thought it would be and I feel honored by and grateful for their sincerity and openness in talking about this album and their inspirations.
Valor: This might be a hard choice, but what is your favorite piece of inspiration for the album?
Ben: Rumi’s “look at love” poem. [pictured below]
Daniel: Clarity, Transatlanticism, and American Football LP1 are all huge influences for how I write guitar parts. Also, the television show LOST.
Nick: Sufjan Stevens is always huge for me; I think a lot of how I hear arrangements and textures is subconsciously informed by my love of his work, whether it’s in the interplay of arpeggiated guitar parts, my approach to the piano, horns, synthy stuff. Master of atmosphere.
Valor: Were there any non-music people or events that influenced the album? What inspiration did you take from them?
Ben: my wife and I went through a really difficult year together: we were tryinto start a family and get pregnant, but we struggled to. Finally we got pregnant, but then we had a miscarriage. Probably the hardest experience of my life. These songs are the songs I wrote processing how to support and love my wife and myself during that pretty difficult time.
Daniel: I think watching Ben go through a very difficult season in life, experiencing it with him as a friend, it gave me a level of love and care and connection to these songs. The songs are not about my personal experience directly, but I was able to contribute to them “in first person” because of my close connection with Ben as he experienced these things.
Ryan: I’ve always enjoyed the evocative simplicity of Mark Rothko, and that felt like the right artistic approach to bass on this album.
Nick: I remember reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us around the time we were demoing the album; there’s such vulnerability and power in the way he writes about loss, and I wanted my contributions to our album to honor these songs that sprouted from a place of grief and resilience with a similar reverence.
[Side note from Valor: Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is one of my favorite books and everyone should at least consider giving it a read!]
Valor: What music did you grow up on?
Ben: I grew up on a lot of 90’s radio rock, stuff like Third Eye Blind and Ben Folds Five, and Christian rock that I encountered at youth group. I was on the Weezer message board in middle school, and that got me into a bunch of second wave emo bands like American Football, the Get Up Kids, the Anniversary, etc. And then in high school, my buddy Ward turned me on to post-hardcore stuff like Thrice, Thursday, and mewithoutYou.
Daniel: 90s-early 00s emo, stadium rock, butt rock, and CCM/Youth group adjacent indie bands
Nick: The first thing I remember loving was my dad’s classic rock and hair metal, but Neil Young’s Greatest Hits and big band swing compilation CD’s were pretty formative around elementary/middle-school. I absorbed a lot of country growing up in Montana but didn’t want to admit I liked some of it. Relient K became my first favorite band after accidentally buying their B-sides album at a Walmart(??), which led to me getting into a bunch of Tooth & Nail bands/Christian-adjacent emo and heavy stuff. Thrice (The Alchemy Index) and mewithoutYou (Ten Stories) rewired my brain, which led me to Radiohead (OK Computer/Kid A). Hearing “Your Hand in Mine” by Explosions in the Sky in a locker room before a football game was life-changing. Somehow got into IDM, ambient, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor through Owl City, which I can explain… but it would take a while.
Ryan: Big Midnight Oil fan here – not a band that ever got that big in the US but I loved their sound and lyrics as a youth (still do).
Valor: What is your personal connection to nature like? Do you have a favorite bug/insect, a favorite plant?
Ben:I really like going on walks and I really feel a deep connection with the moon for some reason. I really like moths, they’re so confused and erratic and fragile and I feel that way sometimes too.
Nick: My wife got me a pair of binoculars for my birthday and I have gotten into birding quite a bit. I was really into dinosaurs as a kid, and birds are actual living dinosaurs, so it’s been a cool outlet to tap back into some childlike wonder. Sometimes I’ll go for a walk without music and listen to the birds instead. A northern flicker visits our backyard almost daily, and I say hi whenever I see him at the top of the bare tree in the neighbor’s yard.
Daniel: I love to garden and work on my yard. Growing grass from seed, tending the garden beds, picking flowers, I love all of it. Our back yard has a huge ash tree that shades the yard and provides a temporary home for birds and squirrels. I feel like that tree, one that was lovingly planted before I was born, is a gift every time I sit beneath it.
Ryan: I live near a state park with a lot of wildlife in it, and I love the coyotes and owls that live there – you rarely see them, but if you listen at night you can almost always hear them . . the sounds they make are fascinating to me.
Valor: What were you feeling upon completing this album? How does that compare to when you started it?
Ben: Deep healing, to be honest. Writing and arranging and recording this album created some much-needed distance from the harder and difficult feelings. My wife and I can now listen to these songs and feel joy, which is a wild thing.
Nick: Few things bring me more joy and fulfillment than making something beautiful with my friends. Also deep contentment and even some relief… it was like a 2-year process and there’s a lot of mystery (and moments of tension) along the way. There’s so much sheer effort that goes into making albums, and finally getting to call it “finished” feels like a miracle.
Valor: What has the fan reaction to “broken open seed” been like? How has it made you feel?
Ben: it’s been fun to see people resonate with such a weird and philosophical song about death lol.
Nick: It’s kind of a challenging song for us to play live, but we ripped it when we opened for Foxing a couple nights ago and it seemed to go over really well with the crowd, which was encouraging.
Valor: What was the most satisfying song for the band to write or to complete?
Daniel: I feel like “what I have to say” is one I am most satisfied with. I am so pleased with how some of our more intricate musical ideas came together on this song. The outro of this song is a musical bit that we’ve been jamming on for years. For it to finally find a musical “home” in this track was very satisfying.
Nick: Word! Producer Dave had me improvise the sax solo (on “what i have to say”) and I wasn’t prepared to do it. He says that the Holy Ghost is in the first take (basically, there’s something beautiful that happens when you’re expressing without overthinking), and I think it’s mostly the first take on the recording! It’s really satisfying for me to capture “moments” that you couldn’t manufacture or otherwise prepare for.
Ryan: “When Your Eyes Close” was fun for me because it was built around the bass riff – and it’s the most The Cure sounding song we’ve ever done, much to my delight.
Ben: I think it’s kind of insane that “help me let the right ones in” even came together at all. That song started out as a strummy boom-chucka folk song, and it ended up in strange Coldplay / the Cure / brit-pop territory. The last two minutes of that song may be the wildest thing that i’ve ever been a part of musically.
Valor: How is how we dig in the earth different from the band’s self-titled 2022 album?
Nick: This record is more considered and deliberate overall; LP1 was self-produced, written and captured over many months with a “Yes, and…” approach, where we were just having a lot of fun seeing what we could make together, arranging as we recorded. Kind of guileless, in a cool way! For LP2, we knew we wanted to record it with a producer (Dave Wilton), and we did a lot of pre-production so that we could come into the studio really prepared to crush things out in about a week. The production feels a bit darker, deeper, more cinematic and detailed. I also think it covers more ground, both sonically and emotionally.
Ben: We had almost no expectations that anybody would listen to LP1, and we were really pleasantly surprised that anybody gave a heck about our band. So going into LP2, we definitely felt like 1) the subject matter deserved to be taken very seriously, and almost sacredly, and 2) we felt the pressure of “oh shoot, there’s people who like our band and are excited for what’s next from us.” So we felt a little bit more anxiety (in a good way) going into the writing and recording of this record. But for real, this new album is probably the best thing I’ve ever been a part of creatively, so I’m super proud.
Valor: How does the band feel knowing that the release show, the first time this album will be heard live, is right around the corner? What has the preparation for that been like?
Nick: Stoked!! Getting to play the whole record front to back is such a gift, and it might be the only time we get to do it live, so it feels like a sacred experience for us (hopefully other people like it too!).
Ben: Shows are funny! They are super temporary and ephemeral, they happen and then they’re done and that exact night with those exact people and the exact way you play those songs that night will never happen again. But in your memory, shows can last forever. I’ll never forget seeing Jimmy Eat World on the 10th anniversary Clarity tour. I was changed by that show, ya know!! So I’m not saying that our album release show will be life changing for somebody, but it will probably always exist in someone’s memory, even if it’s just my memory or God’s memory. And that’s something special.
Valor: You’ve shared the album preemptively with journalists/writers/bloggers and others within the DIY scene – how have their reactions made you feel?
Nick: This has been really encouraging, for the most part. We don’t have the band cash for a PR agent or really any kind of paid promotion, so Ben just put out an open call for whoever might be interested in helping us and had a surprising amount of folks reach out. Daniel has been emailing a bunch of publications/podcasters. We’re super grateful for everyone who has believed in us/cared enough to help spread the word. The music industry is cooked in so many ways, and it’s practically designed to take advantage of artists, but our experience has been that there are a lot of good people out there who are passionate about helping smaller bands just for the love of it.
Ben: So true Nick.
Valor: What song from how we dig in the earth is the band most excited to see the reaction to?
Nick: I’m really eager to play “Help Me Let the Right Ones In.” It’s probably the most catharsis we’ve managed to fit in a song and I think it will lend itself well to people singing/screaming together.
Ryan: Help Me Let the Right Ones In is such a wild song, so many cool parts and just a thesis statement for the album
Ben: I’m going to say “help me let the right ones in” too. I don’t know how we’re going to pull off playing that song live, to be totally real with you. It’s 7 minutes long! The vocals are way too high for me at the end of the song! It’s got some pretty profound vibe shifts. Stoked to try tho lol. Valor, I loved these questions!!! Thanks for engaging with our songs so thoughtfully!!!
I feel so lucky that I was given the opportunity to hear this album early and to interview A Place For Owls about how we dig in the earth and what has gone into creating it. This album and the way that I’ve experienced it remind me of something that I am continuously discovering and processing: we are all grieving something and we all love something. We all carry this grief and this love with us, we all hold it somewhere within us, and I think that perhaps the reason that this community is the way it is, that any community is the way it is, is because we are able to share our grief and our love with one another, we are able to let the intertwining threads of love and grief weave around us, but not just us alone, it weaves and spins around and surrounds everyone, creating this big web of love that supports us in our grief. I will forever hold some grief with me, as I’m sure everyone does, but the same goes for love – there is love and grief that I will never let go of, and it makes me who I am. That grief and that love makes you who you are. A Place For Owls shares with us their grief and their love, weaving the web bigger, giving us a place to be cradled within, somewhere that our grief is heard and seen, and our love, too.
I first heard this album on August 9, 2024, and I heard it while driving through western Kansas towards my hometown, this small, little place that I know like the back of my hand. Fields and pastures pass in a blur on either side of the car, the sound waves of how we dig in the earth creating this ambience pushing me further and closer to my home, to my past, to the depths of my heart and my grief that most of my childhood is gone and inaccessible, that I have to grow up and can’t go back in time to lay in front of my great-grandmother’s fireplace for forever. This album forces me to look back at everything that I’ve done, that I’ve accomplished, and to let myself feel grateful and proud of the sheer triumph of being alive and doing those things and being who I’ve become. As humans, we have to experience grief, but grief is only one side of the coin, as humans we experience great love, too. With this album, I am forced to scream out, “I love you Hutchinson, KS! I love you, NASA internship! I love you, Model United Nations! I love you, parenthood and complicated familial ties and familial drama!” And I scream this out because if I do not love something, I do not experience the grief of its loss – and I grieve the ending of everything that ends, and I love the beginning of everything that begins. Grief is only one side of the coin.
This album is a beautiful, cosmic reminder that while we may lose important things, some of them feeling too important to possibly lose, we gain things as well, we gain people, places, experiences – and all of that is just a hallmark of the human experience. I am part of the human experience. A Place For Owls is part of the human experience. We are all part of the human experience. I want to continue experiencing what it means to be human, and I want to do it with everyone I love, and I want to do it to the sound of how we dig in the earth.
Written by Valor
