The musical environment Mutual Benefit creates on their latest album, Skip a Sinking Stone, is quiet, warm, folky, generally pastoral, string-forward with a lot of unobtrusive flutes. There’s a cricket sound or two woven into the mix somewhere, and if you play the album loud enough while doing chores around the house you may end up conjuring a little chandelier of lightning bugs in the kitchen.
Unassuming vibes provide a perfect backdrop for the record’s quick (but gentle) left turns, of which there are plenty. You think a song is just going be a pretty and meditative bucolic number, but then out of nowhere 50 stringed instruments burst out of the ground and suddenly you’re plunged into a moment of deep philosophical and emotional inquiry.
As the title hints, Lee’s primary subject in Sinking Stone is the reluctant acceptance of life’s major abstractions, primarily love, the impossibility of true communication, and the impermanence of all things.
Many lyrics and bits of orchestration on the album embody those ideas, but my favorite moment comes in “Skipping Stones,” a song about cautiously welcoming new love.
“I’m so afraid to feel this way again, but I let you in,” Lee sings. Just then, the strings pick up, deep piano notes begin to sound, drumsticks tremble on a cymbal, and from some more distant place, Lee sings, “Love is the loudest of sounds/ it’s the hymn in the air, it’s the dirge from the ground.” He ends the next verse with the phrase, “I’m so afraid to fall in love again, I know how it ends,” and then he hits you with the same blast of strings and quivering notes he used before. This arrangement reflects love’s bittersweet and circular nature, and the fact that the music’s so good reminds you of love’s undeniable pull. (Other tracks where this sort of thing happens: “Not for Nothing,” “Many Returns,” “City Sirens,” “The Hereafter.” Seek them out.)
Lee’s use of musical language to describe love (c.f. love as “hymn” and “dirge” in the last paragraph) suggests that he’s suspicious not only of new affections but also of music’s call, a kind of musical apathy that can set in when a musician has been touring non-stop, as he has since his critically acclaimed record, Love’s Crushing Diamond, came out in 2013.
I gave Lee a ring to ask him about how he’s keeping it fresh on the move. He’d just woken up in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a town whose name he said he loved, and he was en route to Yosemite, where he hoped to see but not get eaten by a bear.
Production quality is a little cleaner on this album than on the last one—what accounts for that?
Partly it’s because we upgraded our equipment a little. A smaller percentage of our things were broken this time around. The biggest change is that I did not mix this entire album myself. It used to be that I’d sit in my room and listen to the song a million times until I cried because I’d listened to it too much. But this time we got Brian Deck to mix it. He did [Modest Mouse’s] The Moon and Antarctica and a couple Iron & Wine albums I love.
How many are you traveling with?
We’re a lean four-person crew.
How are you gonna make all those wind noises and cricket sounds with just four people?
We all play a ton of different instruments. Flute, melodicas, synthesizers, guitars and banjo, hand drums—plus all our harmonies. We’ll get it all in there!
Who or what do you turn to for lyrical inspiration?
I think the main thing is writing in the journal in the morning, and keeping track of what images and phrases come up day after day. I kinda leave it up to the subconscious to sort it all out. I write for long enough until I have a sense of what my brain is telling me to write about. Other than that, I just try to pay attention. Try to be off of my phone as much as possible, try to look around, to eavesdrop, and to take pictures so I have a lot of imagery to draw from.
Did you ever go through an emo phase?
I grew up in the Midwest. There was definitely an emo moment that swept through town. I was into pop punk for a while. Never got into emo, though. Unless you count Bright Eyes. I was not immune to the charms of Saddle Creek.
What facts of life, big or small, have you been reluctantly accepting recently?
It’s a little cliche, but my way of working through things is writing about them. Each album that I release is an incredibly cathartic experience. Now that this one is out, I’m in this honeymoon moment, where I’m happy to be touring, happy to be embracing life’s moments of temporary happiness. I’m trying to stay in that headspace until life becomes terribly complicated again.
