The Innocence Mission have announced their 13th album, Midwinter Swimmers, which will be out November 29 via Therese / Bella Union. It’s their first since 2020’s great See You Tomorrow.
The first single is gorgeous “This Thread Is A Green Street” which Karen Peris says is “a sort of envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss.” She adds, “the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects – a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970’s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.”
The video for “This Thread Is A Green Street” was animated by Karen Peris, who used those ideas of sewing, stitching together backgrounds from maps, cloth swatches as the world of doorways and a photo of the 1964 World’s Fair taken by her father. There are people moving through them, along with lyrics that appear as diagrammed sentences. It’s a video that is as evocative of that early-’70s feel Peris describes — not unlike what she imagined on 2021 solo album A Song Is Way Above the Lawn — and you could imagine this as part of a PBS children’s series back then.
Watch the video below.
Midwinter Swimmers
1. This Thread Is A Green Street
2. Midwinter Swimmers
3. The Camera That Divides The
Coast Of Maine
4. John Williams
5. We Would Meet in Center City
6. Your Saturday Picture
7. Cloud To Cloud
8. A Hundred Flowers
9. Orange Of The Westering Sun
10. Sisters And Brothers
11. A Different Day