At the very least, touring under the epic shadow of 2024’s total solar eclipse had to be disquieting for the Montvales. At most, it was an ominous, even perilous sign, especially for an astrology buff like Molly Rochelson.
“I was thinking about what it meant to be in this lineage of traveling strangers and cultural witnesses during such catastrophic times,” says Rochelson, co-leader of the Cincinnati-based folk/roots duo with lifelong pal Sally Buice. “I wondered what would become of us, both personally and collectively.”
The Montvales funneled that angst and uncertainty into Path Of Totality. Officially out tomorrow via Free Dirt, their third full-length LP was produced by Mike Eli LoPinto (Chris Stapleton, Emily Nenni), who also recorded their 2024 release, Born Strangers.
Rochelson and Buice offer a more detailed look at each track.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “World of Trouble”
Rochelson: “The week of 2024’s eclipse, we were on the road from Pittsburgh to Texas, inadvertently following most of the path of totality. It was an extremely surreal experience. There were people from all over the world in every rural gas station, and every hotel room was suddenly twice as expensive. More importantly, in the spring, student demonstrations across the country called attention to the unfolding genocide in Gaza and were being met with violent backlash. Americans suddenly grappled with a deeper understanding of the suffering their tax dollars were funding, amid a skyrocketing cost of living. I wrote this one on an early morning outside Galveston, Texas, staring across the bay and trying to capture how punch-drunk I felt.”
2) “Hellbent On Colorado”
Buice: “A road-trip song and an anthem for low-income horse girls … a journey from Tennessee to Colorado in a totaled but semi-functional Toyota Camry. ‘Hellbent On Colorado’ was written in retrospect about quitting my job in early 2021 to go be a wrangler on a ranch. That precarious trip led me to the expansive freedom of living and working on 100,000 acres in the San Luis Valley between the Rocky Mountains and the San Juans. The cycles of life and death on the ranch reminded me how pretty much everything is borrowed only for a time. I wrote it after I moved to Cincinnati, sold the old Camry for parts and hung a picture of my favorite ranch horse on the wall.”
3) “Loud And Clear”
Rochelson: “A song about falling in love with my partner—who initially moved to East Tennessee to go to a bible college where dancing wasn’t allowed—at a Knoxville dive bar.”
4) “Carolina”
Buice: “This was written in the wake of Hurricane Helene. It explores the creeping feeling that late-stage capitalism has left us with very few places that still feel safe. I was out west when the hurricane hit, surrounded by folks who know what it’s like to have to leave home in a hurry when the wildfires spread. I took an early-morning drive through a darkened canyon of elk and felt, if not safe, alive. I got an email from somebody we met at a show in Taos, N.M., who asked for the lyrics to a song and said, ‘I hope the machine never finds you—or if it does, you tell it to fuck off.’ I saw a video of a lone fiddler playing on a stranded North Carolina mountainside. I talked with Molly, who was working with our Cincinnati neighbors to send supplies to folks in East Tennessee. All those pieces came together to make ‘Carolina.’ I called upon the steadfast, rooted sounds of home when I was writing this one.”
5) “The Wicked”
Rochelson and Buice: “Written during and right after the eclipse tour, feeling very in over our heads but still devoted to the dream … re-defining success outside the paradigm of linear time. So what if we’re doomed here now? We’ll just find each other in the next round and pick up where we left off.”
6) “Plains Of Ohio”
Rochelson and Buice: “This song is based on a scene from the book Stay And Fight by Madeline ffitch, a sort of Appalachian-gothic, queer-homesteading novel based in rural Ohio. In this scene, Karen has just discovered that her family’s dwelling is in the prospective blast zone for a natural-gas pipeline that’s about to become operational. In an act of desperation, she hitchhikes back south from the fracking site where she’s been working for months, steals a bunch of pool-cleaning chemicals from Walmart and uses them to sabotage a compressor station, halting the company’s progress.”
7) “Cincinnati”
Rochelson: “This song arrived in a moment of trying to learn how to be gentle with myself and others while living through ongoing collapse. I was recognizing the importance of getting quiet and going slow enough to listen to my heart and be present with people who need me, even as the world demands urgency.”
8) “Runaway Horse”
Buice: “Written in the middle of a summer when every possible margin felt dangerously thin, ‘Runaway Horse’ is a lamentation-turned-bop to embody the energy necessary to keep it all moving. The song takes a tour through the struggles to pay rent as a farmer/musician, keep up with a never-ending stream of evil legislation and wade through chronic illness with family. There isn’t really a solution here—just a commitment to keep sharing songs and walking through the metaphorical garden with loved ones.”
9) “Overtime”
Buice: “A two-stepping number about post-breakup housing insecurity—contrasting the straightforward manual labor of working on a farm with more nebulous kinds of emotional labor.”
10) “Funeral Singer”
Rochelson: “I wrote this from the young and feral part of my brain that’s willing to go to war to protect powerful women from a culture hellbent on putting them in their place. The inevitable result of a childhood spent riding around with my tough social-worker mother, listening to songs like ‘Goodbye Earl’ and Martina McBride’s ‘Independence Day.’”
11) “Our Lady”
Buice: “A snapshot of my grandmother’s story. I found out many years after her death that she had spent some of her last money to go on a pilgrimage to what was then Yugoslavia, where a few teenage girls had reported seeing the Virgin Mary. Nobody remembers anything about what she saw there, but I like to imagine it was worth it.”
12) “Eastern Bluebird”
Rochelson and Buice: “A hymn written in celebration of the kinship we’ve found with other freaks across the country—all of us deviant, self-righteous sinners, hurtling down the crooked path to freedom together.”
See the Montvales live.
