For Nick Spear and Susan O’Dea, who perform together as the duo “Big Sky City Lights,” their recent EP “A Mountain To Go” represents a continuation of their musical growth in line with their ongoing ambitions. It’s there in the instrumentality — including experimentation with bigger orchestrations born of rock and roll influences — and in the songwriting, which for this project emerged from a more forward-looking vantage.
In some ways the contrast and the change in perspective was inevitable, given the insular, pandemic atmosphere under which their debut album “Wake Me When We Get There,” came together. The world has changed dramatically in the intervening years, but there were other influences at play on “A Mountain To Go,” which also explain why a band that released an album in October is finally performing a release show in March.
As O’Dea shared, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer right as they started to write “A Mountain To Go.” The first round of demos for the EP, called “The Basement Tapes,” were written while O’Dea was in upstate New York helping to care for her mother after her initial diagnosis. Spear made the trip upstate with O’Dea, and ended up sleeping in her parent’s basement, as they continued to find time to write and create. Images of guitars on hospital beds and memories of heavy conversations invariably arise when they look back over the period in which “A Mountain To Go” came together.
O’Dea’s mother passed away in late August and so when “A Mountain To Go” came out in October there was no EP release concert at the time. This Sunday, when Big Sky City Lights take the stage at the O’Shaugnessy Center in Whitefish, the goal is to make the concert feel like a celebration.
Despite the heaviness, and sadness, that they experienced while working on “A Mountain To Go,” the two songwriters — Whitefish-based Spear, and New York City-based O’Dea — are in agreement that there is a clear throughline of love across each of the EP’s six tracks. It’s there from the imaginative yearning on display in the opening track, “If I Were A Painter,” to the final track, “When All Our Hair Turns Gray,” which offers a rebuke to the idea that age can triumph over matters of the heart.
“There are songs on there that have sort of a full-circle feeling of what it means to love someone through all the different timelines and beyond,” O’Dea said.
Parts of “A Mountain To Go” were recorded in Montana, and other parts were recorded in New York, with some of the songs stitched into one.
“I mean, there’s one song where the drums on the verse of the song were recorded in New York, and on the choruses they were recorded in Montana,” Spear said, adding that “it’s kind of amazing that it all hangs together, given the different nature of everything coming together.”
Adding to the sense of meaningfulness that the March 16 show has, is the fact that O’Dea will be performing while several months pregnant. She joked about some of the practical concerns that creates when it comes to holding a guitar, but added that it’s something she’s still fully processing.
“There was such a feeling of loss and rebirth, like simultaneously in my life. And music is the way that I kind of make sense of everything in my life,” O’Dea said. “So it feels very powerful for me to be bringing another girl into this world, and hopefully she can hear what we do on Sunday the 16th, and be a part of it in the future.”
The March 16 show at the O’Shaugnessy Center in Whitefish will include not just music from “A Mountain To Go,” but also a variety of older songs, and some new music that has yet to be recorded. Joining O’Dea and Spear onstage will be Ross Bridgeman on the keyboard, Matt Seymour on bass, Paul Meredino on drums and Todd Cowart on the guitar and mandolin. There will also be special guests playing in with the band, including Mike Murray and Ross Bridgeman, who both worked on “A Mountain To Go” as producers.
Tickets for the show can be purchased on eventbrite, and more information can be found on https://www.bigskycitylights.com/. The show starts at 7 p.m.