Innocence Mission

Interview with Karen and Don Peris of Innocence Mission.

The first studio album from the innocence mission in four years, Midwinter Swimmers sounds

immediately like an old friend. At the same time, it’s a new kind of adventure for the beloved

Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts, having both an

expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk/pop

album, brimming with melody. Midwinter Swimmers is being released November 29 by Therese

Records in North America, Bella Union in the U.K. and PVine in Japan.

“It’s like it was recorded at Western Electric in the 60’s, and makes me think of Vashti Bunyan

or Sibylle Baier, but also has these emotional bursts of orchestration and drums and harmony

coming in - the sound of the innocence mission never stops getting richer”, writes one early

listener and friend. Lead single and album opening song ‘This Thread Is a Green Street’ is a perfect entrance into the innocence mission’s sound and sensibility. Karen Peris describes it as “a sort of envisioning the

landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss. And the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects- a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970’s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.”

‘This Thread...’ is the first of a trio of songs on the new album (the second being the title song)

about missing a loved one who is away, and of how love can transcend distance, Karen says.

Piano melodies and high electric with strummed nylon string guitars make a glimmery

soundtrack for ‘Midwinter Swimmers’, a happy-sad song of hopefulness about seeing an absent

loved one soon. It takes place during an instant when swimmers seen at a distance through tears are refracted and appear as something beautiful and moving. Something of this feeling is echoed in the recording, made with a spontaneity and a sense of trying to capture a single moment and

hold it up to the light.

This attentiveness to small detail typifies the way the innocence mission’s songs look closely at

everyday moments as miraculous worlds of their own. Karen’s words stand on their own as

poetry, with a particular sense of place and color, of the visual, that communicate universal

experiences of change and loss, and of love, hope, and gratitude.

Walking is a recurrent happening in Peris’ songs, as she finds herself taking walks on most days

of the year, and looking up into trees, which continue to be another feature of her lyrics. In one

verse of closing song ‘A Different Day’, she relates a favorite sycamore tree to an imaginary

appaloosa horse that she might ride to visit a friend, underlining her hope that she could be made into a stronger, more courageous person who is without anxiety.

This same hope of personal transformation is present in ‘Orange of the Westering Sun’, which

recalls being in California to record the innocence mission’s first two albums. “This was at Joni

Mitchell’s house, and the air always smelled like lilies so it became Easter-like, which may have

been one of the reasons that there was the feeling of being at the start of something”, Karen

remembers. (In a full-circle experience, Karen, whose first favorite song at five years old was

‘Both Sides Now’ was invited by Joni to sing on her album Night Ride Home, an honor she

treasures.)

On the opposite US coast, a favorite place visited by the Peris family called Two Lights in Cape

Elizabeth is the setting of the dynamic and ambient ‘The Camera Divides the Coast of Maine’.

Karen explains the song is “thinking about the nature of place in regard to time - when we think

of going back, is it as if to visit an earlier time in our lives? I often think of the Ivan Lalic poem

that says something like: Is this a street or years?”

Here, and throughout the album, there is a palpable emotion inherent in Karen’s voice, and in the

distinctive combination of Don’s luminous, high electric guitar lines with Karen’s low (baritone

and nylon string), rhythmic guitar and piano playing. Their longtime friend Mike Bitts adds a

further dimension of upright and electric bass. ‘There is a companionship about Karen’s voice,’

Don Peris says, ‘and a realistic joy and gratitude, in the midst of life’s difficulties, that she is

expressing here on songs like ‘Sisters and Brothers’. I feel bolstered and comforted by them’.

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