Cass McCombs :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

His tenth full-length, Heartmind at times feels like a representation of Cass McCombs’ own wandering mindset. While the album’s eight songs vary in tone and style, they all seem to hold a common thread, whether lyrically or musically. It’s an album that McCombs couldn’t have intended to make precisely, as to direct himself toward it, would’ve been to betray his own ambitions.

Cass McCombs :: Heartmind

In the liner notes of Cass McCombs’ tenth full-length album Heartmind is a rambling paragraph that hides within it a depiction of the creation process: “If I direct myself, I betray my direction, so I keep walking..” McCombs seems to be telling a story about caroming about the streets of San Francisco, but it’s also something akin to a lost Oblique Strategy. Within the album’s classic run-time of 8 songs and 43 minutes is a genuine attempt at avoiding betraying direction and attempting to understand more of the world around us.