The band’s newest album, appropriately titled Texas River Song, was born from 2020, a year of river trips instead of touring and playing shows. Lindsey reminisces about “the Llano, the Frio, the Colorado, the Guadalupe, the San Marcos, the Pecos, the Devil’s. The rivers soaked up the burden of my sorrow and loss. I watched ospreys and bald eagles catch fish. I got sunburned and windsheared, broke my thumb and twisted my shoulder. Time on the river has no meaning, especially if you go out for days at a time. The return to the outside world feels like a far away appointment you know you’re going to be late for anyways. Why rush. A month, a season, a year. Sun has riz, sun has set, here we iz in Texas yet. Rollin on the river.”
Little Mazarn’s Texas River Song is a geographic love letter, inextricably linked to the land. It takes its name from a public domain song of mysterious but undeniably Texan origins. It’s no surprise that ‘Texas River Song’ became this album’s title and centerpiece, the beating heart of the whole project. The spirit of a place is a dynamic, living thing. Entire lives and stories can pop up like bluebonnets, with striking definition and clarity, if only we are patient enough to see them. This brings Verrill’s description of The Hole in the Wall to mind again. With their new album, Little Mazarn offers an invitation to become “sweetly frozen in time,” to leave behind far away appointments and seek out a quicksandy river of our own. “It is a Texas album” Verrill says, “ simply because it isn’t trying to be anything else. Crickets on Caddo Lake. Vignettes of lonesome hill country graveyards and starry prairie nights. Cowboys songs. Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. The quiet 4 walls of my room. I am a Texas musician simply by not trying to be anyone else or go anywhere else.”
