Indie rock band Father Mountain have premiered “Friends” the first single from their forthcoming debut album Apartment Living today. Apartment Living will be released on November 10th, 2017 and is available now for pre-order at www.fathermountain.com.
“This is a song we love that really challenged us in the writing process,” admits guitarist Austin Hohiemer. “We have sometimes had a tendency to write flowery, lengthy songs with a lot of movement. We made a concerted effort to keep this one short and punchy, and allowed ourselves to loosen up a little with the cheesy guitar solo.”
He adds: “It was a lot of fun to track, and I actually ended up playing an old Japanese guitar of Matt’s for the solo. You can hear the way the pickups squealed every time I lifted my fingers. Lyrically, I think it’s one of the more straightforward songs on the record.”
Although the band now calls Nashville home, Father Mountain first began on a street corner in Owensboro, Kentucky, where they wrote the majority of their debut LP Apartment Living. As a result, it takes aesthetic influence from the feeling of growing up in perceived isolation in middle America. “In our formative years, friendships were as much a product of proximity as they were shared interests or ideologies,” says Hohiemer. “As you grow up and learn how to be yourself, it can be hard to see where you fit in once you don’t look like the same person you were in high school. For me, our music is a product of trying to figure out my place in the world outside of just my hometown.”
Working for the first time with a third-party producer, Apartment Living was recorded and mixed in Atlanta, Georgia by Matt McClellan (Being As An Ocean, My Iron Lung, Capsize) and mastered by Jesse Cannon (Brand New, Bad Books, All Get Out), with the addition of Overslept’s Elias Armao on drums. It spans various genre classifications, embracing aspects of guitar rock and pop, which allows Father Mountain to resist being aesthetically pigeonholed.
“Going into this I think we felt more comfortable as storytellers than as songwriters. We met over Bonnie Raitt; bonded over Manchester, Noname, short fiction audiobooks, and Rumi; then grew together living in a van with podcasts, Joyce manor and Jonwayne riding shotgun. That process of learning how to trust, forgive and create together is as much a story that bled on to this album as what we actually wrote about, discovering what it actually means to be friends.” says Martin.