The Great American Canyon Band

The Great American Canyon Band has a way of making us feel like we’ve been sitting on our asses too long. It has a way of painting a current climate that is nothing like the current climate. It’s something that’s been retroactively fit into a romantic’s view of the way it should always be, albeit with more woesomeness. With the overwhelming sadness that percolates, there come some lovely trade-offs. For instance, if you’ll look up for a second, you’ll notice that you’ve never been able to see the stars so clearly or brightly than you’re able to when husband and wife team Paul and Krystal Jean Masson are singing together, in their riveting and strategically methodical style. They trade lines, adding more and more substance to these tales of people who are cautious about love, and rightly so. They sound as if they’ve been sunk a time or two and they’re trying to help others not repeat the same mistakes, though advice like that is always so easy to dismiss because no one ever feels as if anyone else could ever understand what their very particular love is all about.

The Massons sing at one another, “And if love does turn black/You must never go back,” and the words sound about as foolproof, about as clear as they could ever be – enough to save someone the time and the heartache, but given out, those words probably didn’t make an ounce of difference the next time a love turned black. The bad still comes. It seems to never be too horribly bad though. It’s just enough that you think as if you’d like to leave. It won’t be forever, but you need to get out of there.

The Massons tend to make us feel like we’re headed out the door. We haven’t packed much of anything. We haven’t told anyone where we’re going, really. We don’t have a plan for the trip. We think we’ll just get outside our house and leave. We’ll hitchhike and see how far the generosity of strangers will take us. We’ll fight those urges to fill every second with talking and we’ll live warmly through those prolonged stretches where nothing is said and the scenes outside the windows seem to be more heartbreaking for their immensity more than anything, for your inability to ever be a part of them – even when they look more incredible than anything you’ve seen in all your life. They seem more heartbreaking than anything you might be going through, so you’ve been helped by the abundance of struggle that never has to be yours.

Session Tracklist
1. Wild Heart
2. Lay My Body Down
3. Lost At Sea
4. Tumbleweed

Hometown
Baltimore, MD

Visit the band’s website

For our friends who live in countries where YouTube is blocked, watch the session on Vimeo.