H.C. McEntire solo release
H.C. McEntire
H.C. McEntire, frontwoman of Mount Moriah, strikes out on her own with her debut solo album LIONHEART. Stereogum describes her voice as “weary, wise, and bright as morning sunshine all at once,” That sunshine glows throughout the triumphant LIONHEART. For the album, McEntire collaborated with many of her favorite musicians, including Kathleen Hanna, Angel Olsen, Amy Ray, Tift Merritt, William Tyler, Mary Lattimore, and Phil Cook, while remaining bravely devoted to her most authentic self throughout the process. What is so unusual about a solo career for a front-woman band like Mount Moriah? Mount Moriah, unlike Paramore, seemed to have an expiration date for dissolution set at the band’s beginning. Anyone looking for a reason for H.C. McEntire’s solo release need only review our extensive coverage of this creative artist over the years.
Durham Cool readers will remember how much we love Mount
Published on Jan 29, 2018
H.C. McEntire – Red Silo
H.C. McEntire (Mount Moriah)
Red Silo
The Pinhook – LIONHEART release, Night Two
Durham, NC
2-10-18
Music
SONG
Red Silo
ARTIST
H.C. McEntire
ALBUM
LIONHEART
LICENSES
[Merlin] mergerecords (on behalf of Merge Records); LatinAutorPerf, Polaris Hub AB, House of Hassle Publishing LLC, Exploration Group (Music Publishing), Abramus Digital, and 2 Music Rights Societies
As the singer for Mount Moriah, H.C. McEntire first gained attention presiding over the North Carolina band’s earthy country-rock realm. And while her solo debut is just as rootsy, it finds McEntire adopting a more nuanced approach to her Americana inclinations. Her organic Southern charm still spills out from every corner, whether on the graceful, piano-based ballad “A Lamb, a Dove,” the chamber-folk feel of “Wild Dogs,” or the full-bodied forward momentum of “Quartz in the Valley.”
Get your copy of the new release before your friends and family 😌😊😌😉
H.C. McEntire – New View (Official Music Video)
H.C. McEntire – One Great Thunder (Official Music Video)
H.C. MCENTIRE
“ONE GREAT THUNDER”
DIRECTED BY / EDITED BY VICE COOLER
STARRING H.C. MCENTIRE
CONCEIVED AND COMPLETED IN LOS ANGELES OVER A 24 HOUR PERIOD ON APRIL 17, 2018
re: Every Acre — July 21, 2022
For weeks I have tried to compose an intriguing and articulate synopsis of this album, something digestible and succinct. Ten pages, four restarts, but nothing was landing right. Frankly, it feels impossible to presentationally compress Every Acre into a few neat paragraphs because I’m living through its thick motions and messiness in real-time. Because the truth is: I’m still lost, staggering through the woods somewhere inside it.
Writing Every Acre was an act of survival and it is the most personal album I’ve made. It is also the most honest. And with all due respect, I want the lyrics to do the talking. That is where I walked intimately with my depression, loss, betrayal, love, impermanence, confusion. The words are where I sorted the pain. Grief doesn’t happen in a straight line – there is no quick elixir, no barometer for progress, no pace to follow – because there is no real finish line. Just forward.
What I will say is it was written in deep quarantine isolation and it presses on the importance of bearing witness, trying to get through one day at a time, doing the best you can with what you have in that moment, with one foot in front of the other. That is how I started to slowly dig below the surface – into ownership, into ancestors, into stewardship, into the delusion of power and last names and property lines. I learned that if I want to see things as they really are, if I am brave enough to accept the truth, I need to engage with the uncomfortable and unknown. Be present. Get tender. Stay curious. Keep compassionate. Choose courage. Invite the suffering to the surface and surrender what I think I need the most.
When collecting material for this album, I felt an unfamiliar inclination to leave room for unborn ideas, trusting they would reveal themselves in the studio. I came to know a calmness in allocating for emptiness. A large part of my journey to healing has manifested in the depth of my collaboration – with Missy, Luke, Casey, and Daniel; an alchemy for which I am most grateful, and most proud. Together, and together only: we made Every Acre. Sometimes the best way to understand what’s happening around you, what’s shaping inside you, is to get out of your own way. Let go of the need to name it or nurse it into what you think it ought to be. Lean into the chests of those who’ve seen you from all sides already and live in that hold for a while.
If you listen, look closely, it will all show itself to you. Houses have stories – beneath coats of paint, inside chimney flues, rosin fingerprints, cobwebs in corners. The land does too – forgotten trading paths, river stones, buried pits of Ball jars. Throughout Every Acre I said a slow goodbye to all of them. And in the end, even my beloved hound.
If you ask the full moon for the big love, you will find that new view. Everything might not always dovetail gracefully, or at all, but an unmanufactured life is worth dancing in the shadows for. If you find peace in love’s soft crook, rest inside it as long as you can. And let the clover cover your garden from time to time…sometimes the growing has to happen inside.
Land is a muse. Time is a teacher. Loss is a mentor. Pain is a healer. Nature is holy. Love is a revelator.
And some stories are not yours to tell.
H.C. McEntire – Baby’s Got the Blues (Official Music Video)
From the album LIONHEART, out now on Merge Records.
http://smarturl.it/HC-LIONHEART
Directed and Edited by Jared Hogan
Produced by Heather McEntire and Jared Hogan
Cinematography by Christian Schultz
Titles by Eric Hurtgen
Color Graded by Jacob McKee at The Mill
Dovetail
H.C. McEntire –
H.C. McEntire – Soft Crook (Official Video)
Music
Mount Moriah – Lament
Director: Habib Yazdi
Director of Photography: Andrew Synowiez
Gaffer: Alex Maness
Production Stills: Lalitree Darnielle
If this will be
Anything
Then let it be
Over
Because the heart can’t keep
Trying
To love something
It doesn’t
If this will be
Anything
Then let it be a
Disaster
A mouthful of bees
Couldn’t stop me
From whispering,
I don’t know you.
But if scars could sing
About the permanent things
They’d say it’s damaged
But it was something.
If this will be anything
Then let it be over
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Heather Mcentire / Robert Miller
Lament lyrics © Rough Trade Publishing
Lament
A great video, a familiar Durham NC setting for an incredible song. The line “a mouthful of bees could not stop me from whispering “I don’t know you”. Quite the rhyming sequence. Consider for just a shutdown moment, the prospect of a mouthful of stirring bees. Next, If stars could sing about the permanent things, they would sing, “It was damaged but it was something”.