“Thin Legs is about being tired… just wanting out. You ever carried a baby after a hike and their legs dangle? It’s like that, stay and sway, kicking black boots on the end of thin legs. Of course there’s a good amount of prose and I use an interpersonal relationship of the romantic style to sort of drive this home but it truly is about exhaustion.”- Christopher Mansfield
Fences has announced a new album titled ‘Bright Soil,’ due out later this summer.
The first single “Thin Legs” is out today and accompanied by a music video directed by Spencer Sease.
“I felt empowered by other people,” says Christopher Mansfield, ahead of the release of ‘Bright Soil,’ his new full-length album under the Fences moniker. “I didn’t feel alone. I felt happy.”
The LP, due in August, spotlights not only a time of monumental changes in the artist’s life but perhaps his most cohesive album to date.
For the album as a whole Mansfield assembled what he refers to as his “dream band” with lifelong friend Felix Pastorius (son of Jaco Pastorius) on bass and Jeremiah Green (Modest Mouse) on drums, drums. Wesley Schultz (The Lumineers) and Ryan Lewis (Macklemore & Lewis) also add vocals and production respectively. Mansfield’s wife, Maxine, also appears.
“I just wanted it to sound cohesive,” he says. “With my previous full-length albums, I’d recorded them in different states with different producers, different drummers, different everything. For this, we had a room for a specific amount of time. That’s it. It was like, ‘Lock the door and don’t kill each other.’”
He adds, “I wanted to get people whose sound I loved so that if I wanted to, I could just leave and I could trust that they’d do their best. Jeremiah has a great natural flow to his playing and Felix is even more technically proficient than his father in some regards. I think he’s the best bass player in the world right now.” For guitar he turned to Thomas Hunter of The Heavy. “I wasn’t being greedy but wanted to get the best players—it was like picking a soccer team in school. It was a joy.”
Mansfield also became a father during the cycle for the album. “As much as you feel like you’ve geared up for it, no matter how much you’ve prepared you really have no idea what it’s actually like,” he says. “I think I was blissfully ignorant of the magnitude before. But there was this beautiful thing about my wife being around and knowing that my daughter could hear the music. All the beautiful things that you would think I would think.”
Listen to his single “Niagara” here.
What others have said about Fences:
“Breezy, rustic, big-hearted indie folk songs that should appeal to fans of Lord Huron, Manchester Orchestra, and other stuff of that ilk.” – Brooklynvegan
“a vivid, poetic encounter with a talent operating on his own terms” Clash
“…alongside down-and-out saints with vigour like Townes Van Zandt, Elliott Smith and The Cure, Mansfield sears vivid scenes rooted in hardship, drinking, despair and fear of losing love into the psyche…..yet at all times he does so with a hand on his pop pistol, ready to blast completely into smithereens what, on paper, would look like just another hushed singer-songwriter on a downer” –Drowned In Sound
“…further testament to Christopher Mansfield’s deeply emotional and expressive song-writing. Writers such as Mansfield remind us that pop can still be spiritual, sublime, its expressive qualities capable of elevating the spirits and challenging our preconceptions about art of any kind.”- PopMatters
“As an artist, Mansfield is comfortable in many lanes. He can croon with an acoustic or glide on a house beat or singe on a hip-hop track hook. His talent is malleable…”- American Songwriter
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