Less than a year after our founding, Sustain’s first Songscape song is officially released! You can now purchase ‘KTAADN’, by folk-rock band Parsonsfield, at their website HERE.
KTAADN is the product of Songscape: Katahdin Woods & Waters Recreation Area. Songscapes are Sustain’s songwriting retreats, where we partner bands with public land organizations. Through the hospitality of host land groups, we send bands out for a few days of immersion in protected landscapes. The musicians use this time to write a song inspired by their experiences and their environment. This song is then donated to the host land group, and used to inspire and encourage audiences to value these landscapes.
In our first Songscape project, we partnered folk-rock band Parsonsfield, with Katahdin Woods & Waters Recreation Area in Maine. Parsonsfield, formed in Connecticut in 2010, has played their rowdy Americana folk music across the USA and throughout Canada. David Vescey, from The New York Times writes, “They harmonize; they play saws, mandolins and pump organs; they back their songs with crickets and squeaking screen doors; they are boisterously youthful yet deftly sentimental...”. Theirs is a sound that has its roots in Maine as well. The name, Parsonsfield, comes from the rural town in southwest Maine where they recorded their first album. Those crickets and squeaking screen doors were courtesy of the old farmhouse recording studio there, called Great North Sound Society. Parsonsfield was very excited to pilot the Songscape program, and spend a week in Maine exploring Katahdin Woods & Waters Recreation Area (KWWRA).
Located in the shadows of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest and most storied peak, Katahdin Woods & Waters Recreation Area offers a sneak peak of land that one day could become a new national park and national recreation area. The land, bordered on the west by Baxter State Park and with the amazing East Branch of the Penobscot River running through its heart, includes unparalleled opportunities for traditional outdoor recreation and an opportunity to see firsthand the woods and waters that have helped to define the state. It is KWWRA’s hope that the Katahdin region, and KWWRA specifically, will gain public support to become America’s next national park and recreation area. This unique and beautiful landscape has such a rich history and ecology, and it deserves to be shared with the nation.
