Fences has announced a new album titled Bright Soil, due out later this summer. The first single, “Thin Legs”, has been released and is accompanied by a music video directed by Spencer Sease. Fences is the moniker of Christopher Mansfield and this will be his first album under that name.
Mansfield says of the new track:
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.
For the album, 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. Wesley Schultz (The Lumineers) and Ryan Lewis (Macklemore & Lewis) also add vocals and Production respectively. Mansfield’s wife, Maxine Mansfield, also appears on the album.
Mansfield shares:
I just wanted it to sound cohesive. 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.’
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.
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.
