Rowdy roots rockers The Mallett Brothers Band have a new album on the way—Vive L’Acadie!— and are unleashing a new single, “Timberline (High Times)” today. The song is a road-worn rocker, barely contained as it barrels down a dusty musical road. “Timberline,” a hopeful song about struggles faced by returning veterans, was written lakeside on an overcast evening at the Mallett family camp (which is what folks in Maine call a cabin), nestled in the Piscataquis County, Maine woods.
“The band had been busy, it was summer 2016, and I was psyched to get a little solo time in the woods,” says Will Mallett who shares frontman duties with his brother Luke. “I cut the radio off somewhere on the long back road just south of the Appalachian Trail’s 100-Mile Wilderness, the hammer was down, it looked like a storm was rolling in, and I got these lyrics rolling around in my head. When I got to the lake I sat on a rock with a notepad and pen and wrote a bunch down. I had been reading Vaclav Havel’s Disturbing the Peace and trying to process some of that, and thinking about things like veterans coming home from some of these more questionable imperial expeditions, and how we construct meaning in a world that produces all the horrors and absurdities of the 20th century and our own, and optimism, and so on,” he continues. “Mostly though I just wanted to try and capture that feeling of driving fast down a wilderness road headed for the hills, and I think the fellas really brought that home on the record.”
Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “Timberline (High Times)” by The Mallett Brothers Band: