Photo by Kyle Lehman
S. Carey and John Raymond
It’s often said that absence makes the heart grow fonder but for two classmates–turned–collaborators, it’s more like distance makes the music grow stronger.
Bon Iver’s drummer and supporting vocalist Sean Carey and four-time Grammy-nominated jazz trumpeter John Raymond met nearly two decades ago as students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, later parting ways to each embark on highly successful music careers. Now prolific musicians, the pair have infused jazz and indie-folk inspiration in a yearslong musical collaboration resulting in Shadowlands, a genre-bending album that drops on September 15.
“It’s everything that you want in music,” says Carey, who has performed solo under the moniker S. Carey for more than 10 years. “It has moments of sparseness, moments of heaviness, moments of excitement.”
“It was magical how it came together,” adds Raymond, a Golden Valley native and professor of jazz trumpet at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
Prior to Raymond's career as a professional trumpeter, flugelhornist, and composer—and before his classical jazz instruction with notable mentors such as Robert Baca, a UW-Eau Claire professor of trumpet, director of jazz studies, and founder of Eau Claire Jazz Inc.—Raymond was an enthusiastic participant of the Minnesota Institute for Talented Youth in St. Paul. He fondly recalls spending his high school years at the now-shuttered St. Paul jazz club Brilliant Corners. “Jam sessions would go until like, three or four in the morning,” he says. “Somehow my parents were cool with it.”
In 2008 and 2009, Raymond flexed his musical chops as a finalist in the jazz category of the National Trumpet Competition. He performed, composed, and arranged on Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band’s 2019 Grammy-nominated album Presence. He also arranged and recorded on three Grammy-nominated songs for R&B singers Ann Nesby (former lead singer of Twin Cities-based Sounds of Blackness) and Calvin Richardson.
The new album—which follows last year’s heart-wrenching release Break Me Open from Carey and Raymond’s toe-tappin’ Head Towards the Center with jazz quartet Kind Folk—invites listeners to leap into a new musical world: one that blends indie, folk, jazz, and pop, and floats into an atmospheric-electronic soundscape. “The music that we made is really singular in that sense,” Raymond says, “and I’m excited to hear how it’ll be received.”
The title of the album is inspired by the concept of British author and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, which appears in the final chapter of the final book (The Last Battle) of The Chronicles of Narnia series, titled “Farewell to Shadowlands.” It also appears in the book Lewis published as he contemplated his faith following the death of his wife Joy Davidman by cancer—The Great Divorce, which helped inspire a TV show and stage play titled “Shadowlands.” The shadowlands, Lewis muses, is a mundane, ephemeral, and perhaps less-real world compared to a utopian heaven.
Carey’s tender vocals, largely inspired by Raymond’s melodies on flugelhorn, evoke an idyllic sense of serenity—one that is singular to the reserved Eau Claire native’s work. Yet the improvisational, almost conversational, elements of jazz—a specialty of the more outspoken Raymond—unusually complement Carey’s indie flair. Few albums have successfully converged jazz and indie/folk, Raymond says. But for the pair of band kids–turned–legends, creating this unique combination was simple.
“It hasn’t been hard,” Raymond says. “It’s been very, very symbiotic. Like there’s one brain, and two people.”
The 10-track album was recorded at sound engineer Brian Joseph’s intimate studio Hive in Eau Claire. (You might recognize Joseph’s producing creds on albums by Sufjan Stevens, The Fray, J.E. Sunde, Lanue, Humbird, Hemma, and—yes—Bon Iver, though Sun Chung of Red Hook Records takes credit for producing Shadowlands.)
“There’s some taxidermy, there are bee’s nests, there are petrified insects,” Carey says of the Northwoods studio. “There are thousands of feet of rope that line the walls that not only look cool, but they also help sonically… It’s a space that is very cozy and intimate. And artists get there, and they just feel comfortable, and they feel inspired.”
Most of the album was ideated prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2019, though the duo returned to the studio more than once to piece together what is now Shadowlands, dropping a number of singles—“Calling,” “Steadfast,” “Transient,” and “Chrysalis”—throughout this past summer.
“There were a few things in that initial batch of sessions that were pretty special,” Raymond says. “And I think we knew it immediately, like, ‘Oh, this is really something here.’”
Shadowlands notably features both regional talent—Minneapolis-born multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Ylvisaker, Deephaven-based Christopher Thomson (AKA Cedar Thoms), Eau Claire–based bassist Jeremy Boettcher, and former Bon Iver stage manager Ben Lester—and national talent, including New York–based bassist Chris Morissey, Denver-based guitarist Dave Devine, Seattle native pianist Aaron Parks, and Australian singer-songwriter Sophie Payten (AKA Gordi), plus mastering by New York-based Taylor Deupree. Kyle Lehman of Eau Claire’s Ivy Media shot an accompanying documentary—a preview of which was shared in July.
Following the album’s digital release, Carey and Raymond will embark on a Shadowlands tour this fall, beginning on September 29 at The Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis with special guest (and friend) Hemma.
Listen to S. Carey and John Raymond’s new album Shadowlands, out from Libellule Editions, on September 15 via Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services.
