Hearing the title of the new Band of Horses album is a bit of a Rorschach test: Things Are Great. Things are great? How do you see it? Is it an affirmation? Is it a sarcastic tongue-in-cheek response you might give an annoying co-worker when they ask how your day is going? The answer, we’d suppose, is based on context and background. So here’s a little background…
Ben Bridwell, the lead singer of Band of Horses, was going through a breakup with his partner. He’d replaced more musicians in his longtime indie rock band. He’d realized there was too much infighting, so he stepped up to co-produce his latest album. He was trying to stick to his routine of raising his kids and writing songs as a pandemic threw everything into disarray.
So the answer to the question — How do I interpret the phrase ‘Things Are Great’? — is with a healthy bit of cynicism. But that is only the beginning of the story. In this session, Ben takes us through the events that led up to Things are Great in his usual self-deprecating charm and, in the process, shows how his resilience has led to one of the best Band of Horses albums yet. Our chat, in a moment, but first: Here’s a bit of the track that opens the album, “Warning Signs.”