SHEARWATER, THE NEW WORLD

“I wanted to write a book about Antarctica that was not about penguins, seals, whales, polar explorers, and melting ice sheets. I wanted to talk about everything else, because there are so many other things to talk about when you talk about life in Antarctica. My hope is to reveal that in a way that’s delightful and surprising to readers, and so the music flowed from those thoughts and those energies.” 

— Jonathan Meiburg

Jonathan Meiburg has never confined himself to a single creative outlet. For more than two decades, he’s balanced writing, science, and music, first as the driving force behind Shearwater, while also collaborating with Loma and publishing acclaimed books on the natural world. All of these pursuits are interwoven, as the places he travels, the landscapes he studies, and the questions he explores as a writer find their way into his music. Nowhere is that more apparent than on Shearwater’s new, eleventh album, The New World, an album created alongside Meiburg’s upcoming book, The Secret Land: The Once and Future Life of Antarctica.

Research for the project took him to Tasmania, Oman, Chile, and Antarctica. The album cover is one of Meiburg’s own photographs from Antarctica, and field recordings gathered during his travels are placed throughout the record in ways that make you feel like you are part of the actual environment. Musically, The New World is one of Shearwater’s most immersive records. There’s a quiet beauty to it, but also a sense of scale, with arrangements that are expansive even as small details quietly surface. It’s music that lets the natural world take center stage. At its core, The New World feels like an extension of the ideas that Meiburg has discussed exploring in The Secret Land. It’s about Antarctica as a much older, much more complex world that exists outside the stories we tell ourselves.

Listening to The New World, you don’t get the sense that it’s just a collection of songs or a companion to a book. It’s something greater. A reflection of an artist working to fuse music, literature, and the living world. This is an album that, if you give it your sustained attention, will leave you seeing the world just a little bit differently.