EDWARD GAUVIN

Though I have all the Innocence Mission albums from Glow to the present inclusive, I’ve only really listened to the latest, We Walked in Song, and to the much earlier Birds of My Neighborhood, drawn as I had been to them after hearing a single from the former, posted at a Pitchfork review that concluded they were still going strong: pursuing in their ambling way, along paths only they might see, a by-now distinctive sound into the further reaches of an aesthetic woods where, though few but fans might follow, their artistry continued subtly to refine itself—that is, vanishing from the scene, they had less and less to do with the world and more to do with their private muses, which is I imagine what happens to most artists, or at least how it looks from the outside, once the world is content to drop them and go nosing off somewhere else. Sights from these woods, as I imagine them when listening: birches, leaves that crackle underfoot, loons, sudden clearings like small meadows, still ponds full of sky where mist gathers by morning. In spare, limpid folk dispatches they report on this, back to the rest of us.