Blame the Shepherd, 3:20

Meek and Mild Mary, 2:55

Shape of a Sheild, 4:30

Leaves a Little Hole, 5:02

The Promised Land, 7:50

Bird’s Eye Chisel is a collection of original songs written by Ashley Hanson and Brian Laidlaw of the folk band, The Family Trade during a year-long Granary Arts Fellowship in Sanpete Valley. It is a “folk” album in its musical aesthetic – acoustic instruments, simple harmonies, lyrical storytelling – but it’s also a “folk” album in the process of its construction.

During their time in Sanpete, Ashley and Brian met with local community members, scholars, musicians, parents, students, and artists to amass a shared library of images and insights about the area’s beautiful, complex history. In story circles, interviews and songwriting workshops, Ashley and Brian listened to the joys and anxieties of modern-day life in the area, heard celebrations and interrogations of Sanpete’s past, and documented all manner of hopes, dreams and fears for the future of the valley.

From this patchwork of quotations and observations, patterns started to emerge, touchstones would echo and rhyme and reverberate, through-lines would thread their way from one conversation to the next. The sheep, the rabbit-brush, the old houses, the new houses, the old-timers, the newcomers, the soil, the chisel and the stone. Those recurring images, which arise in fine variation across many voices, and which accrete new meanings through many generations, are the very substance of folk music itself: the collective vocabulary through which people – folk – articulate their sense of place.

The songs of Bird’s Eye Chisel are patchworks, collages, assembled and recorded in the pioneer cabin of CCA Christensen on Granary’s grounds. They try to do what good folksongs do: evoke a landscape, tell a story, offer a commentary. And although the compositions now exist on the record in fixed form, the artists consider these songs – and, indeed, all folksongs – to be living documents, reborn different at every performance, shifting forever to match shifting conditions, and belonging absolutely to anyone who chooses to sing them.

Inspired by research, interviews and story circles with local community members, these songs were written and recorded by Ashley Hanson and Brian Laidlaw during a Granary Arts Fellowship in Ephraim, Utah. Mixed by David Jacobs-Strain, bass by Philip Kuehn, harmonica by Bob Beach, tintypes by Holly Hooper.