Shearwater Passes Funding Goal For New Album

The band Shearwater has surpassed its funding goal for a special, limited-edition collection of color photos to go with its latest album, The Golden Archipelago. As we noted in an earlier post, Shearwater wanted to include the unbound book of images and documents as part of its Feb. 23 release, but it turned out to be too expensive. So the band turned to its fans with a plea for $6,000. With nearly two weeks left in the funding campaign, the group has already raised more than $8,400.

Shearwater frontman Jonathan Meiburg says that everyone who pledged at least $30 will receive the limited release, with any extra copies going to fans at live shows. "It's a collection of loose pages in a sturdy envelope," Meiburg says. "I wanted it to be like a file you'd find buried in a cabinet in a recently deceased professor's office, compiled over many years, according to a personal logic that's not entirely clear. You can spread the pages out over a table and ponder them all at once if you want. And if you read every word, I think it takes an hour or two.

"We've sort of lost album artwork in the digital age, and I wanted to use the dossier to restore it to The Golden Archipelago. I remember putting on LPs and getting lost in the album covers as a kid, and I wanted this to be a sort of exploded version of that -- a visual companion that invites you further into the record."

The cost of printing and distributing the dossier will be covered entirely by the donations from fans. Meiburg says that any remaining money will go to buy much-needed gear for the band. "What don't we need? We've come a long way from where we started years ago, but the overhead of trying to cart a band around the world for months is insanely high. We dream of buying our own van, or bringing our own sound engineer on tour. Or just being able to cover the rent while we're gone."