Artist Spotlight - Noah Harris

Noah Harris’ Life’s Work frames heart (“Dust Bowl”) and home (“Loving You All Right”) with stark reality (“Bad Debts”). We recently caught up with the Chicago native and current San Antonio resident about the seamless new collection.

“I had written two albums worth of material that I wanted to make in a grown-up fashion,” Harris says. “Some songs were on a record we released in 2021 called Patient Heart. The rest were put on this new album Life’s Work.”

Alt-Country Specialty Chart: Which songs carried over from your earlier work?

Noah Harris: There are a couple songs like “Bad Debts” that stuck with me and wanted revisions from a decade earlier that I wanted to redo, but most were written specifically for this. So, there are two sets of songs and I divided them based on the vibe. Each had its own message on the timeline and overarching way of thinking of the chronology of my life.

Describe the lyrical theme tying the songs together.

The first album Patient Heart has more songs about childhood and into becoming a dad, which was a theme of that record. The others were more into living out of anxieties and existential dread surrounding that. Plus, there are love songs. I didn’t write those songs chronologically, but most stuff on Life’s Work is newer and taking the next step on those themes.

Tell the story behind writing the opening track ‘Dust Bowl.’

“Dust Bowl” is a song where I’m playing with the idea of what happens in the long run. I was telling a narrative story about family and their dream in America and the illusion of that. There is a thematic element in this record that built on Patient Heart, which had to do with all the changes in going from alcoholism to family as we started one with three kids. Patient Heart was about touring and giving over to one way of being and then having all that upended. This one is about settling into that space and thinking a little further down the line.

Drinking and parenting seem like pretty polar ends of the spectrum.

Yeah, but I always joke that years of touring and not taking care of myself actually prepared me for years of parenting and staying up and not taking care of myself (laughs). The skills are strangely similar. You have to be ready to give up sleep and skip meals and whatnot. It’s a joke but they’re similarly wild ways of going about life. It doesn’t feel like settling down in the way that I thought of it as a young person running away.

Does the album title Life’s Work describe these songs as a body of work?

It come up twice in the album. First, I use the idea of life’s work in the classic sense of the collective of your life’s work in “Loving You All Right.” Also, it’s the idea that the people take up that space in my life as opposed to creating a musical or poetic body of work. I quote my mother as saying that “life is work and then you die” in “Mama Said.” That was her line when we were growing up. She was a hardcore gal. So, I put the ideas together. The title is nodding in each of those directions.

– Brian T. Atkinson