David Huckfelt Releases STRANGER ANGELS

David Huckfelt, the acclaimed leader of The Pines, releases his debut album,Stranger Angels today -- purchase HERE + enjoy via Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. The record was written in solitude as Huckfelt was the Artist-In-Residence on Isle Royale and features a dream team of players, from Dave Simonett of Trampled By Turtles, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso and Mountain Man and J.T. Bates of Big Red Machine to Phil Cook, Darin Gray (Tweedy, William Tyler) & Jeremy Ylvisaker (Andrew Bird).

Stranger Angels has received praise from The Current, Brooklyn Vegan, The Talkhouse, Folk Alley, The Bluegrass Situation and Glide, to name a few. To celebrate the release, David shares the video for "Heart, Wherever" featuring Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man) on vocals. The video was created and directed byJeremy Ylvisaker, the multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer who has played with John Prine, Andrew Bird, Jenny Lewis, Justin Vernon & more.

"Heart, Wherever" is a visual quest for home and with wide ranging tour footage from the Mackinac Bridge to the Holland Tunnel and Minneapolis to New Mexico, the video and song trace the journey to find the heart of the matter, the plan beneath the plan in the search for love.

"The title comes from the Lakota translation for their beloved Black Hills, 'Paha Sapa', meaning the heart of everything that is," explains Huckfelt. "It's a tender rumination on how delicately we hang in the balance of a shifting emotional landscape, glimpsed from the windows of our lives ever first-person and intimate. With footage compiled from a three week tour opening for bluegrass wunder-band Trampled By Turtles, the video pairs the one-take spontaneity of the studio track with the one-take reality of life moving through scenes and dreams with the heart intact, vulnerable, and ever at the ready to love and be loved."

WATCH / SHARE "HEART, WHEREVER"
https://youtu.be/VqEZ3qjVb0Y

Stranger Angels draws on deep wells of Native American tradition and spirituality, a life-long anchor for Huckfelt which has developed more fully through working with Native songwriters and poets like John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, Tom LaBlanc and more. The music is both transportive and reflective, focused inwards even as it draws on an abundance of outside influence underneath Huckfelt's stark, raw vocals as he wrestles with questions of fate and faith, responsibility and independence, connection and loss. Artfully weaving the historical, the ecological, and the personal into an elegant lyrical web, these songs contain layers of surprise and richness.

The music on Stranger Angels is both transportive and reflective, focused inwards even as it draws on an abundance of outside influence. Hypnotic banjo and gentle acoustic guitar meet trippy public domain samples and shimmering soundscapes underneath Huckfelt's stark, raw vocals as he wrestles with questions of fate and faith, responsibility and independence, connection and loss.

A former theology student who once wrote and preached sermons in Cook County Jail in Chicago, Huckfelt has gone through the fire and dogma of "heaven" and "god" and come out the other end with a worldview fiercely present, concrete and expansive. "Stranger Angels as a title, to me, has a thousand references to what's left after life and death and experience and loss and love burns off all the easy answers," says Huckfelt. "The idea of god or spirit being hidden under the opposite of what we think we know, of ancestors and spirits visiting us, screaming in our ears all day long, but we miss it because it's different, stranger than we expected... And the kindness we give and receive from strangers, the least, last and lost among us. Our cities are overflowing with strange angels, it's such a mistake when we think we know which or who can offer us something, and which can't. Every spirit has something to give. Then, when I saw the night camera footage of the moose and wolves on Isle Royale, dancing in the moonlight and gracing the forest with their presence, I thought stranger angels indeed."