ALBUM REVIEW: John Moreland Emerges From Time Off the Grid With Clear-Eyed Songs of ‘Visitor’

This has been a Sabbath season of sorts for John Moreland.

Moreland, often referred to as a “songwriter’s songwriter,” is a prolific bard with a steady stream of releases, which made his need to get off of the grid recently less about locating the muse and more about a personal reorientation. The deluge of marketplace pressures and his own doomscrolling habits informed a course correction, which meant cessation from the cycle that had defined his life for the last decade.

As a result, in 2023 Moreland stepped away from the touring life and even set his smartphone aside for six full months. “I needed to not do anything for a while and just process,” he said of the recuperative period in press materials. On the other side, more songs emerged, musically sparse and simple, loaded with important questions and insightful gleanings informed by the digital shutdown.

John Moreland (photo by Pearl Rachinsky)

Visitor, surprise-released today, features 10 of those songs, along with two lovely interludes to complete the sequence, and Moreland handles all instrumentation save for an appearance on lead guitar from longtime contributor John Calvin Abney on “The More You Say the Less It Means.” The restrained arrangements place Moreland’s wordsmithing in the center ring — further emphasizing these lessons learned.

“The news keeps coming steady again / Our condition shows its teeth again,” sings Moreland on Visitor’s opener, “The Future Is Coming Fast.” He begins by admitting, “By now we all know how this goes,” painting us as willing participants in unhealthy practices. Moreland doesn’t come across as judgmental, however. Rather, he’s resigned to new cultural norms of phones-in-hand and 24/7 news cycles. “So leave the banners at half mast / Until nature takes them down at last / The future is coming fast.”

Not everything is so bleak, but Moreland takes his time before changing the subject. There’s a purposeful intent to reveal the way things are before waxing poetic about the way they could or should be. “Gentle Violence” identifies the tension between so many of us these days: “We keep living by the sword / Will we live another day?” “One Man Holds the World Hostage” is as on the nose as Moreland gets, and the result is the song’s author asking, “Why do I keep feeling like a soldier in a holy war that I never signed up for?”

The first interlude interrupts the sequence here and it feels purposeful, a shift from songs about the powers-that-be to the personal. “Will the Heavens Catch Us?” documents our destructive tendencies (“we writhe in agony for our precious little legacy”) only to ask if something bigger can offer salvation for what ails us. “Silver Sliver” laments the state of the music industry that Moreland needs to make a living. “The well’s been dry since 2015,” he admits, “Baptize me in a digital stream / You gotta go where there’s work that pays / Digital souls in digital praise.”

Musically, the gentle fingerpicking that grounds each song on Visitor is low-key and lovely. Such musical gaps allow what few flourishes that come along to truly stand out. “Blue Dream Carolina” is the ideal example and the album’s strongest moment — a true Moreland gem. It’s an artist asking vulnerable questions of his muse while admitting the sorrow of his current state. “I don’t have to tell you this life is pretty painful / Here comes my fallen angel, falling down on me.” When the harmonica hits, it’s akin to the most beautiful moments on Springsteen’s’ Nebraska.

There’s no happy ending to be found on Visitor, but Moreland was never here to please the audience. He even explains as much on the title track, “I will not be your puppet or your payment / Your easy entertainment / for I’ve made amends to me.” Moreland’s artistic integrity will only allow him to tell the truth, and he’s past the point of such false hopes (“There was a time I thought I could make the pain stop”). Still, the music that’s left is an honest companion, an important presence in the void that presses us to pay attention to what matters most.

John Moreland’s Visitor was released April 5 via Old Omens and Thirty Tigers.