Angela Autumn attempts to find heaven on Earth with ‘Believer’

At various points as Angela Autumn penned the songs that would become new album Believer (due Sept. 11 on Gar Hole Records), the Nashville-based country-folk musician found herself in deep isolation, first at a winter writer’s retreat in a treehouse set in the woods outside of Asheville, North Carolina, and later in an empty warehouse amid the frozen rural landscape near Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This sense of solitude bleeds into a handful of album tracks centered on human connection, or more specifically on the ways this connection can dissolve and fall to pieces in time. Witness “Garbage,” on which Autumn details an eroding romantic relationship that falls “one step away from being toxic.” Then there’s “Jesus Heist,” a track where the narrator chooses indifference over sitting with the sting of the inevitable end. “I don’t want to cry/I don’t want to fight,” Autumn sings atop loping drums and the strum of acoustic guitar. “I don’t want to know where you slept last night.”

“With this record, yeah, I was definitely struggling with connection and what that means, and where to seek connection, how to seek connection,” Autumn said by phone ahead of a free concert at the Snow Fork Event Center in nearby Nelsonville on Thursday, Aug. 13. “And then it’s also [finding] connection to nature … and connection to something else outside of people, I suppose.”

Throughout the record, Autumn traverses realms both earthly (desert vistas and mountain landscapes feature prominently) and spiritual, the album’s title adopted in part from the musician’s interrogation of her belief system and the different ways it has infiltrated her life, as she explained it.  Parts of this exploration arrived from having settled for the time in the Bible Belt – “I wrote the title track on Easter Sunday after going past some Baptist chapels and seeing all the Cadillacs lined up outside, imagining all the people in that little space together and how that informs their community and their consciousness,” she said – while others are rooted in having grown up Catholic in Western Pennsylvania. 

“And my faith has actually been deepened by relating the symbology of Catholicism to everyday life,” Autumn said. “It’s definitely grounding for me when I’m traveling to see something like a Mother Mary mural on a wall, especially when I’m out here touring the country by myself.”

Autumn finds similar comfort in the natural world, which within Believer comes to serve as a needed balm from the chaos of everyday life. “I’m so tired of reading the headlines,” the singer sighs on “My Alchemy” – a weight that releases when she’s confronted by the open desert vistas of “Sage Bundle” and the majestic, blue-ridged mountains within the North Carolina-celebrating “Heavy Tobacco.”

More recently, Autumn logged time in the Canadian Rockies outside of Calgary, a trip that inspired a similar sense of connection to her surroundings, and which she said can combine with other past treks to sustain her in those moments when her views are less-than majestic. “You want to have those slides in your mind for when you’re in your bedroom … and there’s nothing to look at but a fence,” she said, and laughed.

The musician attributed aspects of this almost-spiritual connection she feels to the environment with having grown up in rural Pennsylvania in a family that held these surroundings in high regard.

“And every time I’m in nature, surrounded by trees, I feel so grateful to be there to witness it, and it calms my nervous system from the rigors of daily life and our phones and all of that,” she said. “I love Henry David Thoreau … and Walt Whitman, and how they’re able to transcend these complex human relationships by developing a greater relationship to nature. And I think that’s something I carry with me and into the music, too.”

Autumn then asked if she could tell a story as another means of illustrating this idea. One time, the musician continued, she and her band were touring the United States in a gigantic Chevy van – a mid-summer jaunt that led them to the peak of Town Mountain in the Chattahoochee Oconee National Forest of northern Georgia.

“And we drove up this mountain on this skinny dirt road, not able to make any turns, and it just starts, a lightning storm,” Autumn said. “And there’s just something about being on a mountain in a lightning storm, that really electric meeting of heaven and earth. … I’m pretty sure that’s why a mountain is regarded as a spiritual place for seekers, because there’s a top, but you have to walk to get there and it’s full of lightning and bears and rain. And you get tired, too. So it’s almost a place to rest, as well.”