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Hammock. The Nashville duo that never expected to release a record has now released five…all in three years’ time. How does that happen? Chalk it up to two guys just doing something they really love…that, and some very happy accidents. Their latest release, Maybe they Will Sing for Us Tomorrow arrives just as unexpectedly as their first, Kenotic. After an impromptu invitation to give their first-ever live performance at the overseas debut art exhibition of Riceboy Sleeps (Jonsi Birgisson of the Grammy-nominated Sigur Ros and Alex Somers of Parachutes), Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson decided to write brand-new songs to celebrate the occasion, and soon after, these pieces became a new (and unanticipated) release. And Maybe is a surprise in another sense: after four critically-lauded and well-loved albums, the natural and easy thing to do would have been to repeat what had been successful in the past in an attempt to continue widening their commercial appeal. Instead, Hammock give us the most minimalist, purely ambient, and subtle record they’ve ever made—an album with no beats, no lyrics, and guitar parts that were recorded as raw, live, in-studio performances. But Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, despite being unique in the band’s canon to date, still captures beautifully all of those things that make Hammock who they are.

“My nickname back in Arkansas was ‘Marc Marc Marc’ because I used so much delay on my guitar,” says Hammock’s Marc Byrd, laughing. “That sound was my way of expressing what I felt and was an attempt at communicating beauty and space.” Ask Hammock about their musical influences and be prepared to get a list of artists as long as a country mile—but there’s one influence in particular that most informs and defines their music: the Southern landscape. “We were both born and raised in the wide-open, rural South,” says Hammock’s Andrew Thompson. We were communicating space…not undefined, but uniquely Southern space…mountains, stars, cropland, trees, endless sky and wide-open dirt roads.” Byrd continues, “The scenery of the South can be idyllic and picturesque, but also desolate at the same time. There are stretches everywhere that are nothing but miles of shacks and burned-out barns overrun with kudzu. So we were expressing the melancholy of the South as well.”

With no agenda, expectations, or label, Byrd and Thompson began getting together periodically in 2004 to let the sounds inside of them find their way out into the open. Byrd describes it this way: "There are times when the need to create a thing begins to interrupt your life. And if you don't give into it, everything else begins to suffer." After months of sporadic recording and crawling around on all fours, fiddling with knobs and tweaking effects pedals and amp settings, they realized that by the end of the year they had over thirty pieces of music. After listening back to these songs, the theme of an album emerged. From this batch of music, Byrd and Thompson chose the sixteen tracks that would become their self-released debut, 2005’s Kenotic.

Kenotic set in motion a familiar pattern for Hammock: the album managed to find acceptance among tastemakers and listeners across many genres ranging from Post-Rock to Ambient to Electronic to Shoegaze (Byrd and Thompson seem to prefer the term “Stargaze”). Regardless of what newly coined or hyphenated genre term was applied to Hammock, one thing was certain: the duo was fluent in, and admirers of, many different musical styles, and were ace at merging and morphing them with their trademark melodic songwriting approach. As Byrd says, “We didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel. It’s just music. We were always hopeful that because we didn’t have any presuppositions about exactly what the music should be, that people would listen in the same manner.”

They were listening. Kenotic scored with the College Music Journal (CMJ) Radio 200 Chart, appearing there for over two months, and made high profile appearances during NBC’s 2006 Olympic Coverage, ABC’s primetime show Dirty Sexy Money, and on NPR’s All Songs Considered, Hearts of Space, Echoes and Musical Starstreams. A subsequent EP, Stranded Under Endless Sky, met with similar acclaim. Label interest followed, and the band settled in with Vista, CA’s Darla Records (My Morning Jacket, Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd, Auburn Lull, Japancakes). The epic Raising Your Voice…Trying to Stop an Echo appeared in late November, 2006 and quickly became one of Darla’s bestselling titles. Byrd and Thompson were longtime admirers of the work of Jonsi Birgisson (Sigur Ros) and Alex Somers (Parachutes) and their art project together, Riceboy Sleeps—but little did they know until mid-2007 that the feeling was mutual. Conversations between the artists eventually turned into a collaboration, both on the first Hammock live performance/Riceboy Sleeps overseas debut exhibition in Hot Springs and on Hammock’s May 2008 album, Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, which features original artwork by Riceboy Sleeps.

“Our philosophy has always been ‘capture the sounds inside you and see where they want to take you’,” Byrd says. And if you’re making honest records like Hammock, those sounds will take you to every place and through every emotion and experience. This music, like the world outside, overflows with beauty and tension, melancholy and hope. All equally abiding.

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