Seth Glier – “Birches”

The earth speaks to us in a myriad of ways — through ice cores, through uplift and erosion, through tree rings — languages we have the potential to restore our literacy in. Reconnecting with these quiet messages has set Seth Glier, an avid mushroom forager and a Grammy-nominated artist from Western Massachusetts, on a path of channeling nature’s longing for communion with humanity into song. His new album Everything is a collection of eight songs inviting us to imagine a future in which humans and the planet are re-aligned into mutual restoration. 

Each song presents a practical climate solution with concrete optimism.“What if this is the beginning, not the beginning of the end,” the album opens with bristling energy and hope on “Rise,” an anthem about rewilding. “Finally Home” is a celebration of regenerative farming with driving doo wop vocal harmony. “Mammoth,” written from the perspective of a wooly mammoth being brought back to life from frozen DNA, invites us to consider the blip of human history against billions of years of evolution. The album’s guest stars Crys Matthews, Hayley Reardon, and Windborne elevate the record with surprise from the stark choir arrangement of “Birches” recorded a capella in an old church to “My Body Remembers,” a flowing meditation on the transmission of healing, EMDR & The Language of Trees. The album’s title track was inspired by an experience Seth had while foraging. “When I picked up the chantarelle mushroom and brought it towards my nose I first smelled sweet apricot and then my spine straightened suddenly. The feeling was like déjà vu. It was a first time, yet somewhere inside of me I had done this once before. I was reconnecting to a knowledge I had already known.” The album is an acknowledgement of the sacred connections that exist between all living things and is an active questioning of what might be possible collectively. Everything is a reminder that the future is something we always have an influence over.

Seth’s gifts are an innate curiosity and a fierce desire to connect with other people. His musical acumen provides him with a vehicle for both. He was worked as a cultural diplomat for the US State Department and collaborated with musicians in Ukraine, Mongolia, China, and Mexico. Seth has shared the bill with a diverse list of artists ranging from the likes of Ronnie Spector, James Taylor, Ani DiFranco, & Glen Campbell. As a producer, music director, or studio musician he has collaborated with Sophie B. Hawkins, Tom Rush, Antje Duvekot, Richard Shindell, Doctora Qingona, Dar Williams, Nick Carter, & Cyndi Lauper. Seth is a five-time Independent Music Award winner and received a Grammy nomination for his album The Next Right Thing. With a commitment to using songwriting as a tool for positive change, he has written with the students in Parkland, FL for the “Parkland Project,” cowritten with soldiers at Walter Reed, and is an advocate for autism awareness citing his autistic brother Jamie as his greatest non-musical-musical influence.

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