Daniel Talton - Hunt (2023)

Daniel Talton's third self-produced full length finds the songwriter's focus sharpening on traditional song forms reinforced by atmospheric excursions. Texture swells forward and lingers where Appalachian structures dissolve--genuine supplication hides in a spiritual haze.

To arrive at Hunt, Talton abandoned years worth of meticulously arranged material in favor of this more immediate reduction. Hunt reflects the clarity of an artist who has discovered a new intimacy with word and sound--born out of old time folk tradition but just as often furthering the acoustic acid of Pelt's spacious impulses, or the deliberate enunciations of Will Oldham.

Says Talton: Hunt is a game I’ve been playing all my life. As a kid I rode my bike through Houston’s greenbelt, a tunnel of trees snaking through the suburbs. It felt like deep forest to me. As a teen I wandered the unused backroads of my refinery town. Now I walk the trails that zigzag the Angeles National Forest. The landscape is different and the distances are longer now. But it’s all the same game.

If I can go long enough without seeing anyone—person, car, or plane—I can fantasize. It's a time after the Great Event. The old ways are gone along with the people who could not live without them. It isn’t a post-apocalypse of spectacular violence and struggle. That story died with the old ways, was itself an old way. The new ways are quieter and less assuming. Roads crumble and split into forking tributaries. Unnamed paths dissolve into game trails. I trace that latticework in my mind and savor the dusky feeling.

I wonder, what songs will we sing then? There is still acoustic guitar, I’d think. Plenty of those lying around. And a solar panel might power a small pedalboard if the sun is shining. Especially complicated arrangements might prove impractical. But everybody can play around a drone, and an old melody never dies. Some old recordings might even survive, transfigured by time into something different altogether.

Hunt is that kind of game. I can only hope it's lively enough you'll want to play it with me. Let me show you a secret place where ferns dance in the bright spray of a waterfall, where the moss grows green and soft. When it gets dark we can make a fire and eat. My guitar is always on me, and I keep a few other instruments handy just in case. We’ll play through the long night—love songs, death songs, god songs, dream songs—until the dark turns to blue dawn, slow at first and then in a great onrush of light. The birds in chorus and we in tune. Everything singing, sun! sun! sun! sun!