The music of Lancaster, PA's the innocence mission has been a touchstone for the Hearsay editors since they were 17 years old. There aren't many bands we were listening to at that age who remain so completely essential to our lives... perhaps because there's a careful timelessness and method to their music which almost seems to create its own world. We couldn't think of a lovelier band to provide the opening feature of our final issue... here's a brief snapshot of some of the things we discussed with tim's Karen and Don Peris.

HEARSAY: The natural world plays an important role in your songs. Is it a backdrop to the settings and atmospheres you describe, or character in its own right? Is modern society losing touch with the rhythms and meanings of the seasons and nature?

KAREN: The natural world is often where I can see more of God and less of me. And that’s one reason it is ever present in the songs, because I have an inclination to write about escaping from introspection, to picture myself running into the centre of a windy or snowy day and being made clean and new. We live in a mid-atlantic state where we have the most dramatic seasonal changes. It’s really the thing I love best about Pennsylvania. My memories seem to be divided sharply by season; the fall memories are the most vivid but also the most mysterious.

I don’t know that we are losing touch with the rhythm of the seasons. So many people I know feel this same tremendous anticipation at the start of each season, a feeling that everything is beginning, but also of being reconnected to the past because of memory being triggered.

Tell us about the recording of your new album. Was the pared down sound and self-production born out of necessity or was it a deliberate response to the more arranged/produced sounds on previous records?

DON: We recorded this album throughout our house—in the dining room, attic, and basement—as well as at our ‘studio’ in downtown Lancaster. For years we have leased space in the retired Keppel Candy factory. We have been told that the space we occupy was once the lunchroom for the workers. I like to wander through the building reading pencilled inscriptions on the whitewashed wooden walls. Things like ‘Sam Musser—foreman/father, 1923’ or ‘God is within and without—Dolores, 1944’. The pared-down sound you ask about was neither deliberate nor a compromise born out of necessity. Rather, I see it as natural progression—the continuous striving to marry the instrumentation and arrangement to the lyric and song. The fact that we were able to record the songs while they were still new and most felt enabled us to gather performances and arrangements that seemed nearly complete. They seemed to call for little else to illuminate them.

And lyrically you can see a similar development—a move in the lyrics from quite specific stories and characters in the early days towards more focused snapshots of a given moment or psychological state. Are you aware of any ways in which you think your lyrics have developed? And do you think the quietest moments in life often speak loudest to us?

KAREN: Yes, I think it’s when we’re quiet and listening that we learn the most and joyful mysteries are revealed to us. And the greatest happiness can be felt during seemingly very small, everyday moments. For me it’s often best to write about small moments, whether I’m feeling joy or sorrow or, more often, both. Maybe I’m drawn to this because of the way memories come to light, with single moments in clear focus. About your other question, I know that since the days of our first record I’ve felt more and more excited about words and the feeling of community that can arise out of the written word. While we were recording our first album we had some free time and we were in a big city and so we started to explore in bookstores. I’d never read poetry before, or writers like Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. And out of reading I began to feel a greater joy and freedom in writing lyrics. Also I’ve felt a greater need to write as the years have gone on and I’ve been more grateful for the solace of music. There have been more life experiences in living the last ten years and in some of those, specifically the sorrow of not being able to have a child for many years, I’ve felt grateful for the outlet of songs.

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