“Eternal Lightweight” is an album that builds inside itself and yells out with three voices at once. The record is full and brimming, with shifts in mood, volume, and lyric. Nate, Travis, and Daniel, together, lay down piece after piece of a narrative across moments and across the whole to produce stories-in-songs that seem, somehow, to originate in and yet explode out of – to paraphrase “Blowing Up” – a throat tightened around breath in a crowded room.

I’m not sure how to listen to “Eternal Lightweight.” When I listen with headphones, alone, it works its way inside me, each line layering on the next, looping whispered particularities of emotion until meanings change and feeling expands to cover not just one body, but multiple, like “Blanket”’s t-shirt that fits over both “you and me,” more unique and more the same, smashed together and needing one another, even when we are not so sure that we do. “Southern Girls” is a standout example of the ways in which the record fills out – and in turn fills with – feeling. “I need a southern girl / I’ll close my eyes and leap / I need a southern girl / I think I’d like to be one of the southern girls / so come and sweep me off my feet,” Travis sings, tracking out desire and identification. Emotions blend here not by building ambiguity, but rather by building clarification through persistent revision of very human intention and certainty, always mingling with something out of reach and not quite certain, like “a breath and a blush / a turning of the head.”

This is an album that makes me cry when I listen by myself. The stories that it contains are reminders of what it is like to figure things out, often in isolation – to make sense of breath and blush in yourself and others. For a record with three singers, the songs don’t feel separate, or disjointed. Instead, “Eternal Lightweight” moves like three modes of song sung together: story, memoir, and direct conversation. Tunes like “Tetonia,” “Punk,” and “To The Pool” trade in myth, but myth that is always grounded in a specific moment. “Next Summer,” “Blowing Up,” and “Fuck It” tell specific stories, tied to individuals pushing through short periods of time. “Forgiveness,” “Blankets,” and “Sun/Body” reach out directly, turned toward both a subject and the listener, and spoken aloud. Together, these modes feel not disparate, but rather like different ways into a set of experiences that model how to go it alone, yes, but also how to grow and grow up alongside other people with love, nervousness, and ultimately grace.

That’s why I’m not sure how to listen – I want most of all to be in a place I love and with people I love, shouting along while Adventureland jams to the opening lines of “Next Summer” or the ending movement of “Forgiveness.” Sing these songs, loudly, to people you know and people who know you. Sing them quietly to yourself or while you share a pillow with a friend. That friend, this record shows us, is always more than a friend; but also all the people who know us and who we know are both Southern Girls and God (and so are we). After listening to “Eternal Lightweight,” I know that whatever the scale, whatever the relationship, it’s played out the same for “a thousand years,” like “Blowing Up” casually insists. Somehow, that makes each moment with each other all the more important: as long as we try to figure out how to live it, and how to tell it.

-- David Tate