Deluxe 200-gram vinyl LP of Murder By Death’s 2010 album

With their fifth album Good Morning, Magpie, Murder by Death continue the tradition of border expansion. The difference, however, is that this time, the band literally went off the map to get there.

“Going into the woods helped me write in a way I never would’ve been able to otherwise,” says singer/guitarist Adam Turla, recalling the 2009 retreat into the Tennessee mountains during which, armed with little more than a tent, a fishing pole and a notebook, he wrote the 11 songs that would become Good Morning, Magpie. “There were days where I’d sit down and write for seven hours, make dinner, and then sit down and write late into the night with my little camp light going: just intense, nonstop sessions of pure writing. I’ve never worked that way, ever, because with all the business of being a band, I’ve never had so little to do! Every day I was either cooking, hiking while writing, or writing. I didn’t speak to a single person the whole time.”

Be that as it may, Good Morning, Magpie still speaks volumes. Recorded at Bloomington’s Farm Fresh Studios with Jake Belser (who most recently worked with MBD on their all-instrumental soundtrack to Jeff Vandermeer’s 2009 book Finch), and mixed by Grammy-winning Red of Tooth and Claw producer Trina Shoemaker, the album weaves 11 disparate stories into a whole that’s unlike anything else in the band’s catalog. “These songs definitely come together as an album; we just aren’t relying on a concept this time,” says Turla, referencing the conceptual storylines that drove Murder by Death’s last two albums as well as 2002’s Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them? “Being out in the woods with no pressure freed me up to explore different moods and different stories, all of which became linked through the experience I had writing them: just that sheer sprint of working in isolation.”

With its junk-pile percussion and ramshackle Vaudevillian flow, “You Don’t Miss Twice” is the only song on Good Morning, Magpie that directly references Turla’s time in the woods—but the song’s spirit informs much of what surrounds it. “I was telling a friend how I thought this was our most upbeat record, and his reply was, ‘Seriously?’” Turla recalls, laughing. “But ‘upbeat’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘happy.’ Take a song like ‘Yes’—it’s got this fun, shuffling beat and this amazingly catchy melody from Sarah [Balliet, cello], but the lyrics are all about accepting death. Or ‘Whiskey in the World,’ which is basically a sad bastard’s lament about how the whiskey that makes this character enjoy life is also what condemns him. That duality between the music and the lyrics is something we haven’t done much until now.”