Many Disappeared–OUT NOW

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Tell me angel of death / Do you understand yet? / I’m not the one who should’ve seen / I don’t believe in anything. Thin Lear, begetter of elegant melancholia, opens his sophomore album with a bridge falling and a brother’s death. What’s the reason for me seeing? / What’s the reason for anything? / Tell me angel, if you will / Do you think of me still? This tossing of hands to the sky, a dizzied surrender to the absurdity of existence, drives every song that follows.

Matt Longo grew up writing short stories; that narrative instinct pervades his music. He tends towards tragedies—some true, some imagined, and some stuck in between. “I’ve always gravitated to bizarre tales to access my own grief and pain,” says Longo. From “The Mothman” event of 1960s West Virginia which inspired “Silver Bridge,” to the “Mad Gasser” mass  hysteria of 1940s Illinois that backdrops “Mattoon,” Longo collects peculiar lore and studies it for insights into humanity. He pairs odd plots with placating melodies, his voice as pure and holy as a bell. The effect is uncanny—lyrics like a nightmare delivered through a lullaby. “I need something supernatural to wrestle with, just to understand my own earthly troubles,” he says. “I write to access a feeling and get past it.” Longo may summon the ghosts to dispel them, but Thin Lear’s music remains vibrantly haunted, full of eerie figures loping along, human or otherwise, hoping to heal.  

Influenced on a fundamental level by the likes of David Bowie and Karen Dalton, Longo builds a kind of sonic bridge between the two—his emotive folk pop aches and articulates from a strange, starry place. Cultic, mysterious, magical. He recorded Many Disappeared with Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell, John Prine) in Memphis with players including Ken Coomer (Wilco), Will Sexton (Alexa Rose), Rick Steff (Lucero), and Dave Smith (Al Green, Kris Kristofferson, Cat Power) among others. “These were guys I grew up listening to,” Longo says. “It was an honor to be in the same room.” He sought out Ross-Spang specifically for the lively bigness he brings to any record. “Walking in there the first day, people were emotional, and I knew I was on the right track.” 

Longo’s grandfather passed away just before he began writing the album. “He was a loving but enigmatic kind of guy,” Longo says. “The world felt less interesting after he left it.” Dreams followed—vivid interactions with his lost loved one every night. “I wondered if I was making it all up to make myself feel better.” He grapples with as much on “The Haunt,” a gentle, piano-driven track that wonders, Have I gone crazy since you died? / ‘Cause my heart was almost breaking / From this world and all its taking / Is it only me alone and telling lies? Self-described as secular, Longo follows his fascination with the otherworldly beyond the infrastructure of any religion. “Without it, how do you begin to deal with the total weirdness that accompanies loss?” It’s an unpredictable investigation he leads throughout the album, an observer as humble, open, and astonished as any.

In the same time period, Longo and his partner were weighing the choice to have a child. “I felt like there was still so much I needed to fix about myself before I could have this thing I wanted, a family.” He lamented his tendency to self-isolate, his inclination toward loneliness. “How useful is this guy in the context of a family?” 

On album standout “A Cherished Man,” that loneliness manifests in three, distinctly curious characters. Andy drinks himself into public humiliation on a nightly basis; Annie pokes strangers with pins on crowded urban buses; Charlie consumes gargantuan sums of corks, stones, and live animals for performance. It’s a work of masterful poetry, and a poignant testament to the lengths humans will go in pursuit of connection. “I see myself in all of them,” Longo confesses. “They’re looking for love, they’re just not sure how to broker it.” With a delicate wail of despair—almost as though pricked—he sings: They say, you’re only whole / You’re only true / Long as someone dreams of you / And if you’re just set up to fall / You find a way to feel at all. It’s heartrending and conciliatory at once; Longo goes to the freak show, and sees only humans. 

Longo draws from the peculiar happenings of his own life too. “Witness” recounts one of his earliest childhood memories, an unfortunate one. “My friend and I came across a dying cat on the road. My friend was nonchalant. I was utterly horrified.” The song rolls and bounces, nearly jubilant, percussively indifferent to death, as life often is. There we stood, two children at this summer tomb / Heard its final sputtered gasp as flowers bloomed. Longo says, “The incident is still a touchpoint for me, every time I come upon the same powerless feeling, whether it be the loss of a loved one or the general anxiety that the veil between this world and the next is quite thin.” In his wise worldview, everything is gossamer, and so, everything is precious.

For an album rich with human anguish, Many Disappeared proves an unexpected salve. Moving through disaster, loss, depression, and disillusionment, Longo is awake to the hurt, neither minimizing nor aggrandizing, but addressing—and dressing—the wound. “The album isn’t just a reckoning with grief but a confrontation with the inevitable,” he shares. A chilling endeavor he manages, uncannily, to make warm.

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