Vetiver

To Find Me Gone is the second album from Vetiver, singer/songwriter Andy Cabic’s ever-evolving musical home base. To Find Me Gone comes two years after Vetiver’s eponymous debut and is being released May 23 by DiCristina Stairbuilders. Since Vetiver’s release, Andy has toured the world repeatedly as a member of close crony Devendra Banhart’s live band (“Hairy Fairy” and “Queens of Sheba” are among the monikers they’re known by), as well as with Vetiver (occasionally with Banhart in tow); Vetiver released Between, an EP of live and demo recordings in conjunction with their 2005 European tour. Over the passed two years, Cabic’s Vetiver has transmuted into a full-on singer/ songwriter cum band/project aided and abetted by some of the best players (and Anyd’s closest friends ) in the extended family of acoustic/experimentalists he finds himself a central member of. To Find Me Gone was skillfully produced by The Pernice Brothers’ Thom Monahan at his home studio in Los Angeles during the Spring of ’06; Thom also mixed the album with Andy. Most basic tracks were recorded by Cabic with guitarist Kevin Barker (Currituck County) and percussionist Otto Hauser (ESPers) who he then toured with extensively backing Banhart, road-testing and adjusting some of this repertoire during those shows. Finishing touches were added and additional songs recorded throughout the year by an intriguing cast of characters including Devendra, Noah Georgeson (producer of Joanna Newsome and another “Hairy Fairy”), Vetiver’s resident cellist Alissa Anderson, Monahan, Brad Laner, “Farmer” Dave Scher, Dina Maccabee, Irene Sazer, Shaw Pong Liu, and Jessica Ivry among others.

Andy Cabic grew up in northern Virginia and spent a few years in Greensboro, North Carolina, playing guitar, writing music and recording as a member of the Raymond Brake. After moving to San Francisco, Cabic joined the rock band Tussle, simultaneously recruiting other local musicians including cellist Alissa Anderson, troubadour Devendra Banhart, along with special guests Colm O’Ciosoig (My Bloody Valentine), Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star) and the then-unknown Joanna Newsom among others to record Vetiver. The album was released in 2004 to high critical praise from around the world:

Vetiver is named for an aromatic East Indian grass that grows in California, and their music delivers on the sunny, hazy sweetness the band’s name suggests. Singer Andy Cabic has–with some help from Devendra Banhart–written a set of songs that at their best are strange, subdued and otherworldly, a quality you can’t fake… Cabic’s voice lures you in, like a less showy Jeff Buckley, and the rest of the songs unfold like a dream. There’s the rapturous “Without a Song” (with a tapping-break in the middle that’s unlike anything I’ve heard), the jaunty “Farther On,” and the complex epics that make up the album’s last half, with a detour for the goofy “Amour Fou” (co-written with Banhart). This is folk music that combines the ghostly power of scratchy blues 78s with the epic swirl of My Bloody Valentine or Mazzy Star (members of which make guest appearances) Phillip Cristman/Paste

The track at the heart of Vetiver is “Angel’s Share,” named after the whisky that evaporates during the distillation process. It fits a collection which suggests a world where the very atmosphere has become slightly tipsy, at the point between feeling warm and safe and a sense of menace.

Devendra Banahrt (yes, him again) and Andy Cabic have taken their acoustic prairie sounds, added strings and called in some favours. .. the music is toned down because it’s confident enough in its own texture to allow the beating of blood in your ears to provide the percussion.

If Americana has always left you cold, a sip of this could be enough for you to fall under its influence. Simon Hayes Budgen/NME

The languid sounds comes courtesy of Andy Cabic’s quiet, sweetly dazed vocals and guitarist Devendra Banhart’s delicate, rustic strumming. Vetiver has some overlap with Banhart’s solo albums in that if you played it for a time traveler from 1911, they wouldn’t freak out too badly, and it possesses a warmth that can’t be faked. This should prove to be near ideal listening for the summer; great to lay back and drift off to when you’re feeling heavy of limb and light of mind after a day out in the sun. Tom Forget/Bust

Do not, repeat DO NOT, miss Vetiver, the Bay Area not-folk-but-not-rock outfit whose vocals-guitar-cello-violin live lineup brings an extraordinary air of grace and sway to leader Andy Cabic’s strangely ageless, moonlit songs, the kind that Neil Young still writes sometimes. (Jay Babcock)/LA Weekly

Like an album of dreamy, gentle songs that George Harrison would have written in some sunny country garden. There’s hypnotic finger-picking on guitar, a warm steady drone of cello. The band includes neo-folkie mystic Devendra Banhart, who does minimal singing and songwriting for the most part, but one can hear the aesthetic of Banhart’s music here, even if the songs aren’t as haunting. The high point is probably “Angel’s Share,” a lovely song that has Hope Sandoval from the band Mazy Star singing languid and sweet harmony vocals. There’s also a winning and odd swooning eulogy to the Seattle Arboretum. Vetiver is a type of Indian grass, and this is music designed for lazing about in a summer lawn. — John Adamian/Hartford Advocate

In the years following Vetiver’s release Andy toured the world intensively with both Vetiver and in various incarnations of Devendra’s touring ensemble. In early 2005 he joined Banhart in Woodstock to record the latter’s fourth album Cripple Crow and then hit the road again, pausing only in May to do primary tracking for To Find Me Gone and then rejoin Devendra on the road. Final overdubbing and mixing on the album were completd in September and the final results are decisively different from its predecessor.

While as carefully crafted as Vetiver, To Find Me Gone is far freer and more mature, reflecting Andy’s progress as a songwriter, not to mention the musicianly growth experienced by all his friends who’ve lent their support to it. According to Andy, “I feel the new album embodies the swirling duality of these last two years, the duality of presence and absence, both in how protracted its birth has been, and in it’s lyrical themes. There are scenes in the songs where figures come back from far away, to changes and time itself rolling by in their absence. To Find Me Gone has songs of remembrance and recollection, all made in order to conquer absence.” Turning to the music per se there’s a dreamy Topanga Canyon vibe on some songs (underlined by the pedal steel calling in the case of “No One Word”), and plenty of crunchy candy for those who have appreciated Andy’s recent nods towards the magic era of 70’s Fleetwood Mac (check out the screaming guitar outro on “Red Lantern Girls”). Yet everything is simply, amazingly Vetiver-esque, not anything else, as Andy Cabic steps out and makes To Find Me Gone” his own original statement, an album that many will consider as one of the finest album’s of 2006.