Great Horned Owl, the indie folk project of Portland, Oregon-based Vanderson Langjahr, released Longyear, his first album, on June 13th, 2025. Longyear is an album characterized by its soft sounds full of longing and thirst for something just slightly out of reach, grounded instrumentals, and dreamy vocals. Great Horned Owl is an indie folk project that has sounds reminiscent of Joshua Burnside, Frankie Cosmos, and Gerry Cinnamon.
The first track, “Skyline Divide”, is absolutely gorgeous and cinematic in a way that makes you long for some place you didn’t even know that you missed. The vocals are mixed in a dreamy way, giving the audio a hazy quality like a memory that’s been fading for a while. It seamlessly goes into the second track, “Disappear”, which is somewhat softer and has some of my favorite lyrics from the album. In the second verse, Vanderson sings “thunder from your bass drum dream/distortion ringing out in the rafters / was all I ever wanted / but that night was woven with disaster”. The chorus then comes in with a soft synthesizer that helps build the mood and accentuates the plucked acoustic guitar in a really beautiful way that I just can’t get over.
Another track I really love is the sixth track, “Rosa (The Night You Left)”, which has a gorgeous plucked acoustic guitar that creates and beautiful instrumental base for the lyrics, and the hazy, dreamy vocals give the song the soft, yearning quality that I love so much from indie and folk. In “Rosa (The Night You Left)”, Vanderson is singing about a lost love, or a love that was let go, or maybe even a dead love, and the heartbreak feels so personal to the listener that no matter how hard you try, it will still tug at your heart in a way that you can’t escape. The electric guitar in the bridge adds to the mournful quality of the track, building upon the plucked riff of the acoustic guitar that fills the background.
The final track, “Longyear”, is maybe my favorite from the album. The vocal melody is magnetic, and it feels like I could drown in this song, the way that it forces water from my eyes and a lump into my throat. I was enthralled by the instrumental and completely captured by the plucked guitar upon hearing this track for the first time, and I urge all of you to listen to it, even if you listen to no other track on this album. My favorite lyrics from this track, “and we’ll get through this / sailing on these paper ships / my dreams are coming back to me again”, bring back those feelings of missing someplace I haven’t been to in a long time. It leaves you wondering if you miss that place, or just how you felt when you were there.
Music makes people feel things – that’s why we, as humans, like it so much. But few albums inspire such strong feelings in me as Longyear did. It holds me in its cradled arms and reminds me of all of the things that I can’t help but long for, and then comforts me as I realize that to long does not mean to achieve, at least not inherently, not instantaneously. Great Horned Owl does an incredible job with Longyear to bottle the feelings of yearning, the mountains, nature, and loss. This album is deserving of both a listen and your full attention.
Written by Valor
