You don’t just listen to Fletcher Tucker. You sort of get pulled in — like fog drifting through redwood trunks or smoke curling up from an old fire. His latest track, “A Candle“, doesn’t try to charm you with hooks or neat choruses. It calls to something much deeper. Something feral. Something ancient. And I don’t say that lightly — this one feels like it’s come crawling out of a cave older than memory.
“A Candle” began with two scribbled words in a notebook: flute pulse. What came out of that spark is a swirling, breath-fed piece of ritualistic folk — part chant, part trance, all atmosphere. It’s not just a song; it’s a space. Fletcher Tucker layers bamboo flutes, Swedish bagpipes, melodeon, 12-string electric guitar, and raw, elemental percussion into a slow-moving, psychedelic storm. There’s no lead vocal in the traditional sense. Instead, there’s a presence — his voice less sung than conjured, a chant that rides alongside nature itself.
There’s a trance to it. A deep grounding, thanks in no small part to Sean Smith’s rich, earthy bass, which roots the track like a mycelial network beneath mossy forest ground. Mariam Wallentin’s haunting harmonies bring warmth, like the flicker of firelight in a pitch-black space. And through it all, you feel the hand of someone not performing but communing — with the land, with something older than language. The production, shaped by Chuck Johnson, leaves space for everything to breathe. It’s psychedelic without being loud, meditative without being still, and thoroughly alive.
If this track is any indication of what’s coming on the full album “Kin” (out August 15 via Gnome Life Records), we’re in for a deeply elemental journey. Born in the Big Sur backcountry, “Kin” is being shaped not just by instruments but by ceremony, myth, and what Tucker calls “earth-reverent” practice. It’s less an album drop and more like a ritual unfolding in real time.
About Fletcher Tucker:
Based in Big Sur, California, Fletcher Tucker is more than a musician — he’s a full-bodied practitioner of land-based philosophy, co-founder of Wildtender, a faculty member at Esalen, and the mind behind Gnome Life Records. His music, like his life, leans hard into animism, the sacred weird, and a return to the slow and the real. Across his many projects and nine albums, he’s collaborated with everyone from Phil Elverum to Daniel Higgs, always circling the same core instinct: connection, reverence, and art that listens as much as it speaks. “A Candle” is not just his newest track — it’s a flicker of the world he’s building.
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