Album Review – John Moreland’s “Visitor”

Music might be marked by the presence of sound, but it’s the music of John Moreland that compels the hushing of everything else to allow the quietest and most reflective of moments to prevail. In an era when everyone is talking over each other, the beeps and pulsations of push notifications pursue us during every waking moment, and the loudest and most ostentatious are often rewarded with the public’s undivided attention, John Moreland is a mandate to be subdued, to unplug, to slow down, and to listen.
This is a lesson that John Moreland had to heed himself before composing and recording his new album Visitor, released on April 5th without any run up or formal announcement. After his last album, 2022’s Bird in the Ceiling, Moreland was compelled to take a year off from touring, and a full six months away from his cell phone due to what he characterizes as “doomscrolling” through the world’s dire events. It was in these offline and unconnected moments that the brilliance of Visitor arose.
“We don’t grieve, and we don’t rest. We just choose the lie that feels the best,” Moreland sings in the opening song “The Future Is Coming Fast,” accompanied by his gently fingerpicked guitar. This is the introduction to an album that offers more questions than answers, and leaves much unresolved and weighing heavy on the mind. Yet it still leaves you feeling more comforted than unsettled than before, if only because it assures you that you’re not the only one afraid of silent, empty moments because of the way fears and anxieties seems to fill them.
You get the sense that If Moreland was allowed, he would have released pure silence for one of the tracks to underscore his message. As he conveys in the song “The More You Say, The Less It Means,” it’s the economy of sounds and words that lends to more insight. It’s often the ambiguity of his messaging that gives it such stark impact, allowing each song to be what the beholder wants or needs it to be, as opposed to what Moreland decrees as the author.
It’s impossible to talk about Visitor without contrasting it with Moreland’s previous album, Birds in the Ceiling. Starting with Moreland’s 2020 album LP5, a collaboration was commenced with producer Matt Pence. LP5 was unique because it gently introduced a suite of electronic sounds to help compliment Moreland’s otherwise organic recordings. When this was accepted by Moreland’s audience, Birds in the Ceiling significantly ratcheted up the electronic production to a rather unprecedented level, resulting in a full blown folk-electronica work.
The electronic approach to Birds in the Ceiling was polarizing to say the least. And though strong Moreland proponents held pat behind the idea that the album was well above par and groundbreaking, it ultimately received dramatically less plays that previous titles, and by significant margins. The pursuit of his audience’s expectations, and the criticism of critics and fans is partly what led to Moreland unplugging and taking time off.

The approach of Visitor is much more in line with Moreland’s earlier albums such as High on Tulsa Heat from 2015, and what many consider as his opus heretofore, 2013’s In The Throes. If anything, Visitor is even more austere than these previous efforts, with many of the tracks being solo acoustic offerings, including two solo instrumental interludes.
Moreland performs everything on the album himself, including fiddle, mandolin, drums, and guitar solos, with the exception of an acoustic guitar solo on the song “The More You Say, The Less It Means,” contributed by long-time accompanist John Calvin Abney, and harmony vocals by Moreland’s wife Pearl Rachinsky on “Ain’t Much I Can Do About It.”
It wasn’t that concerned Moreland fans wanted to constrict his creativity, or hem him in via genre expectations when they voiced concerns about Bird in the Attic. It’s that the electronic sounds felt like the antithesis to what the Moreland experience means to many—where the songs and the quiet intimacy they create is the centerpiece. The electronic production felt intrusive and suffocating, like someone’s text notifications or ringer going off in a hall completely hushed from the magic of a John Moreland song.
The track “Silver Sliver” from Visitor seems to speak to Moreland’s struggle between the two approaches to his music, along with the allure of technology overall to distract us from our underlying concerns.
There’s a world of beauty, there’s a world of shit
There’s a world at the end of my fingertip
A digital balm for an analog bruise
Which world do I choose?
On Visitor, Moreland chose the analog world once again. But it doesn’t feel like just the musical/production approach is more advantageous. The overall reset and unplugging that Moreland experienced gave him keen insight into how to address the current moments we exist in. It feels fair to offer praise for an elevated level of songcraft compared to his last couple of albums as well.
The music world is now enamored with earnest songwriters like Zach Bryan, who took the teachings of his fellow Northeast Oklahoman Moreland, and delivered them to the arena and stadium level. It might be Zach Bryan who made them stick, but it was John Moreland who helped plant the seed that has now blossomed into this song-first approach that has dramatically reshaped the direction of country and roots music.
Good for Moreland, he’s turned in a record with Visitor that’s perfect for ensnaring this massive new cohort of song listeners, and to take them even deeper into the expanses of the craft in a way that can open up understanding in the human experience in ways few other things can.
8.6/10
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Presence of noise to distract us.
April 7, 2024 @ 9:51 am
Something about John Moreland’s stuff hits a certain place in my heart/soul…I’m a Minnesotan who is now an Okie, and he hits home for both.
April 7, 2024 @ 10:31 am
If you are new to this genre, you might check out Jimmy LaFave. He did a version of Bus to St. Cloud so well I thought he was the writer.
April 7, 2024 @ 5:51 pm
So glad there’s new John Moreland to hear. That is all.
April 7, 2024 @ 6:39 pm
a wonderful album. thank you, john moreland.
April 7, 2024 @ 7:15 pm
After listening through several times, I would put visitor equal to Big Bad Love and only behind throes and Tulsa heat. We will see where more spins take it. This is the album that we need right now. Those instrumentals give me such a pure feeling, like listening to Joseph Huber.
Also, really dig what you were alluding to in the review. Birds is Moreland getting interrupted by dings and tweets on his phone and this is the solution. No phone.
April 7, 2024 @ 8:51 pm
Imagine being an artist and having to follow up on In The Throes, High On Tulsa Heat and Big Bad Luv. After the electronica stuff, you go right back to the stripped down bones, nowhere to hide, just you and your songs. And you nail it with Visitor. John Moreland is still John Moreland, and we are all blessed by that.
April 9, 2024 @ 1:57 am
Amen.
April 8, 2024 @ 5:33 am
Moreland and Katie Pruitt dropping surprise albums over the weekend is everything I needed.
Really great shout on the massive debt Bryan’s style owes to Moreland, too – I’ve always said that he’s a version of William Clark Green that grew up on Moreland and Isbell rather than Bowen and Rodgers.
April 8, 2024 @ 6:27 am
It’s good to see Moreland back to making more organic sounding music. He’s a great singer and can spin a song with anyone. Though there are a few of those songs here, this album hasn’t really hit me like some of his earlier stuff. I’d say better than the last few releases, but not as good as his best.
April 8, 2024 @ 3:12 pm
This is an outstanding album. It might go down as Moreland’s best – which is no small feat considering we’re talking about a guy who’s got an album on the SCM list of best albums of the previous decade (and deservedly so, IMHO).
April 8, 2024 @ 3:30 pm
Good lyrics but musically dull.
April 10, 2024 @ 8:48 am
Agree
April 9, 2024 @ 2:06 am
I got to see John Moreland in the most respectful and intimate setting I’ve ever been in about a year and a half ago. 110 people crammed into a small barn in WI.
Not a single stray sound was heard.
No phones. No side conversations. Nothing. Reverence for the artist and the presented music. Magical night.
Really enjoying this album and looking forward to the next time I can disconnect from the rat race and truly listen again.
April 10, 2024 @ 8:23 am
I love John Moreland, and I can succinctly sum up why more is less with his style of writing.
electronic, noisy music can work and it feels natural for people who are used to artificial sounds stacked on top of one another.
Like endless car horns and sirens and beeps on a new york street.
Acoustic instruments sound more natural to people who live in a quieter area and are used to organic sounds.
To a New Yorker, quiet must be an unsettling feeling.
To someone from the U.P. (eh) a lot of noise must be overwhelming
John Moreland is a quiet writer. his art is quiet, he sings quietly, like he’s afraid to raise his voice
you can hear him breathing into the microphone because he’s such a quiet singer he’s right up on the mic. you can hear his fingers slide and brush the strings around the notes because he plays quietly and close into the mic, and leaves the instruments in the mix to be heard, not buried under more parts
It ‘sounds’ like an imperfection in a world that’s used to everything being sterilized, touched up to perfection.
But it’s organic, it’s real, it’s what real people playing real instruments… actually sounds like.
it’s like being outside and hearing the forest.
I’m reminded of an old betty boop cartoon about an urban woman sick of the car horns and the jackhammers who goes to the country to relax, but the sound of the woodpeckers and the ducks quacking drives her up the wall and the goes back to the city and embraces the noise.
because it feels familiar
And that’s why John Moreland excels at quiet music.
his fans are quiet people who love quiet experiences.
April 10, 2024 @ 9:20 am
Birds in the Ceiling is a really great album. Visitor is too. It’s frustrating seeing negative reactions to it because it doesn’t have typical americana instrumentation, BUT music is subjective and you like what you like. I’m just really happy to have a new John Moreland album!
December 30, 2024 @ 10:42 pm
I’ve really been enjoying this website in the year or so since I discovered it. You review so many country albums that I otherwise would not have heard of, this one being a perfect example. One thing I’d love to see from this site that would make it even better though is if you would do a “Similar Albums” section at the bottom of each review. I love to pair stuff when I’m listening and this would be really helpful.