Great Grandpa and the other side of honesty

For Great Grandpa, the indie-folk five-piece from Seattle, it’s quite the opposite. Over half a decade since their 2019 album Four of Arrows, they return with a 12-track rumination on love, life, loss, and time. It is as much, they tell me, about their time apart as it is their time together. Patience, Moonbeam is a warm, thoroughly considered, and eclectic amalgamation of alt-country and freak-folk, which deserves all the Big Thief comparisons it has received.

It’s early morning for four of the quintet, as they log onto our zoom call from different pockets of America. The untimely hour doesn’t stop their excitement; Patience, Moonbeam will be released to the world in 48 hours. Wonderstruck single reviews have already flooded in. “People are seeing our evolution,” Pat Goodwin, multi-instrumentalist and co-vocalist who took the lead with the previous album, beams at me.

This self-assured slickness exemplifies a new era, preceded by a road of youthful chaos. To me, they speak of 2017 with equal measures awed nostalgia and shuddering dread. “Back in the day we still had that impulsivity. We were willing to do whatever sounded good at the time, even if that required sleeping on people’s floors, or Motel 6 floors,” guitarist and producer Dylan Hanwright reveals, conjuring up a summer where the band, along with an ex-partner-cum-merch-assistant, toured in a truck, pitching tents in gardens and sleeping uncomfortably under the stars, addled with dreaded romanticism.

“We did a lot of what other people told us we should do – a lot of what was expected by others, or seen as a kind of prerequisite for having success,” says Hanwright. Now, finally, they are chasing their own definition of success, one that falls back on an intrinsic enjoyment of record-making as an art-form itself and feels, according to Hanwright, “fulfilling and rewarding not just because of outside pressure.” The record comes out of reality – its immersive, mythical sound all the more impressive for it.

“Sustainability,” says Al Menne, who put out the solo album Freak Accident in 2023. “That’s a word that comes up a lot in our conversation: sustainability for the band and for us as individuals, and putting that first.” The reckless touring “probably led to a lot of unhealthy habits and patterns, but I think that it happened for a reason.” It’s the most consistent thread in our conversation; each member is reflective and open, willing to hold up their perspective as if intrigued by how it is they got there.

I’m struck, but not surprised. The record is, after all, an artifact of time, a reckoning with its slippage. To hold it is to hold the problem itself; how the past and present refuse clean division, how one moment presses into the next – not seamlessly, but insistently. Take “Ephemera”, which explores the transitory nature of experience through Portishead-inspired hooks and a gaggle of synths, closing with a child’s voice bouncing through “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”. The complex textures of sound encourage extended time spent with the album. Months would stretch in which sounds were left untouched, left to breathe to their own tune.

“It was a constant struggle, walking that line between something being overwrought, and having patience,” Pat tells me. Hanwright takes this a step further, equating immediacy with inauthenticity: “when you’re creating something in the moment, you’re not honest about it, and there’s no way to be honest about it. You’re too close to it. You have no perspective. Time allows you honesty, the ability to zoom out a little bit and see it for what it is.”

So what is honesty on Patience, Moonbeam? On the one hand, it’s songwriting that lives the truth of suffering. Pat and Carrie wrote “Kid” in the aftermath of the loss from their first pregnancy. The first version of “Doom”, which finds Menne musing on the toxicity of connection and blaring “it’s funny how I need you, damn,” was so dark and industrial it “almost gave me a panic attack,” says Pat. On the other hand, Menne’s voice itself is synecdochal for complete honesty: “I felt extreme frustration when I was trying to do vocals in the first year of testosterone – definitely not for the faint of heart,” Menne reflects. “In moments of, like, fuck, I don’t know if I can do this, I feel like somebody in the room would kind of steer me back to being able to trust myself.” It’s a stunning, genuine, and familial picture.

“On the other side of honesty is trust,” Menne muses to nodding heads. This works interpersonally as it does musically. In their pursuit to find the “truest iteration of the song,” as percussionist Cam LaFlam states, the band had to be honest about what worked, and what didn’t. “It’s our motto: serve the song,” agrees Hanwright. Pat cites Abbey Road as a methodological influence, the purposeful mixture of voices, the ability to let each player bloom their own skill into each track. “We have a shared, universal language,” LaFlam smiles. Scrapping pieces of music was not an uncommon occurrence, so long the wait for greatness stretched. I speak of an industry obsessed with churning out multiple records a year for profit and relevance in an increasingly attention-deficient society, and they all nod grimly. They are aware that the time this album has taken is both a blessing and a curse.

Perhaps, overall, it is the production that diverges most from their previous work. For Patience, Moonbeam, Hanwright operated at the centre of all mixing and producing. He seems proud, almost incredulous: “I really pushed myself to my limits as a producer.” So much so, that his seven-year stint as a freelance engineer and producer ends as the album is released into the world. “It feels like a save point in a video game – a natural place to pause and move on to something else, maybe forever. With this album, I feel like I said what I needed to say.” I hop around the screen asking the rest of the band if they, too, feel the emotional labour entangled in this album has only illuminated new questions, or encouraged the processing of inevitable change and transformation. The latter unites them all.

Suddenly, Pat and Carrie’s four-month-old son pokes his head onto the screen, chewing with curious abandon at the blinking heads before him. We laugh at his silence, his doe-eyes. The band all seem overjoyed at his appearance. I feel as if I am prying into something wholly divine. Pat’s voice thickens: “I’m incredibly proud of this record and of our band. We’re like a superhero team – greater when combined.” The band expect a final question, some probing What’s next for Great Grandpa? I don’t ask. Great Grandpa are bound by things far less oppressive than time. Like friendship, like five years of suffering and solace, like the sound of a baby’s breath through a zoom call. On Patience, Moonbeam, Great Grandpa prove there’s music in it all.