Jonathan Meiburg was at a fork in the road of his life. At a truck stop somewhere in Oklahoma, he found a payphone and lifted the receiver. He made a call he’d been dreading.
That was in the early 2000s. Mr. Meiburg was on tour as a musician in the fast-rising indie rock group Okkervil River. A few years before that, he had been on track to become a scientist. After finishing his undergrad degree, he won a fellowship to study community life in some of the remotest parts of the world. That adventure included being stranded for six weeks on Santiago Island in the Galápagos archipelago. Mr. Meiburg went on to earn a master’s degree in geography. But then he joined a band. Could he continue his plans to earn a Ph.D. in biology?
“I ended up at a crisis point,” says Mr. Meiburg. “I kind of felt like, ‘Oh, the jig’s up. Like, I’m going to have to either give up music or give up this.’”
Why We Wrote This
Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg is the David Attenborough of rock musicians. When he’s not fronting his band – out with a new album – he’s a naturalist and explorer whose next book is about the beauty and wonder of Antarctica.
He called his academic adviser from the truck stop to explain his decision. He then climbed back in the tour van and headed to the next gig. Mr. Meiburg chose a path in which he ultimately ended up with his own band, Shearwater. Its 11th art-rock album, “The New World,” comes out Friday. Yet Mr. Meiburg’s journey has taken an unexpected turn of late. In parallel to his music career, he’s become a celebrated naturalist book author – imagine Peter Matthiessen, but with a Stratocaster. Mr. Meiburg views the two career tracks as sharing a common goal: exploring the wonders and mysteries of the world.
“I have never met anyone who is as accomplished in two fields as he is, those being natural science and music,” says Jamie Stewart, a friend of Mr. Meiburg and leader of the band Xiu Xiu, which just released its own album, “Eraserhead Xiu Xiu.” “He is an unusual musician in that he has a wildly overlooked technical ability but also an identifiable and singular imagination.”
Mr. Meiburg’s field recordings of the natural world weave seamlessly into the organic soundscapes of “The New World.” For instance, pealing church bells and ululating blackbirds in Berlin herald the tranquil piano motif of “More and More.” “You and Your Dog” features coyotes yipping in Los Angeles. “The Only Sound I’m Afraid Of,” which starts as a hushed ripple but crests to become a tsunami of anthemic guitar, includes the caws of Tasmanian forest ravens.
“The New World” is an album of otherworldly beauty. That owes much to guests such as Shahzad Ismaily, Laurie Anderson, Leo Abrahams, and musicians from Mali playing instruments such as the ngoni, calabash, and yabara. Shearwater’s two other multi-instrumentalist band members, Dan Duszynski and Emily Lee, co-produced the music. As the band’s singer and songwriter, Mr. Meiburg brings a curiosity to explore what he describes as the “physical and emotional realms” of the world we live in.
“The first line of that great book, ‘The Peregrine’ [by J.A. Baker] is ‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.’ And I’m not saying that I can do that all the time, but you do get little flashes of it,” says Mr. Meiburg. “Trying to preserve those and amplify them is, I’d say, the work of both the music and the writing.”
The cover of “The New World” depicts an Antarctic glacier floating in the Weddell Sea. After the album was completed, Mr. Meiburg joined a boat crew on the Southern Ocean. That’s where he filmed a music video for the album’s lead single, “Daydream Unbeliever.” During a seven-week expedition, they sent remotely piloted submersibles to the ocean floor 2,000 feet beneath the ice.
“There are kinds of beauty that I didn’t know existed. Giant glass sponges with sea cucumbers erupting out of them, with their tentacles extended like pink lightning coming at you,” he says. “These were places that no human being had ever seen before … and might never see again.”
Mr. Meiburg says his next book, which is in progress, “The Once and Future Life of Antarctica,” aims to impart an appreciation of Earth’s epochal transformations. He says people spend so much time worrying about everyday concerns that they lose sight of the big picture. Namely, that every living thing is “its own kind of miracle.”
The author’s first book, the critically lauded “A Most Remarkable Creature” (2021), was about a mysterious bird of prey. Mr. Meiburg researched the history of the striated caracara for a compelling travelogue. He ventured to Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago just below the scorpion’s tail tip of South America.
Boating in the jungles of French Guyana, Mr. Meiburg has encountered vampire fish, with teeth that extend into their skulls. In a Brazilian rainforest, he came face to face with a jaguar.
Yet he is just as awed by a slug that has a starring role in a recent Shearwater music video. The promo film for the jazzy song “Slugs in the Marigolds” begins with Mr. Meiburg picking up the slimy creature in a garden. He places it inside a glass jar. Then he carries the slug around for a sightseeing day trip, including a ferry ride so that it can see the ocean.
“The slug, I gotta say, was such a great actor,” says the musician, who returned the creature to its original spot and left it with a leaf of lettuce. “I think mollusks, especially, have this quality where the closer you look at them, the more beautiful they become.”
A lot of things in life are like that, he says.
Mr. Meiburg used to torment himself about choosing music over an academic career of studying fauna and flora. But a few years after that Oklahoma truck-stop phone call, he met his academic adviser again.
“He turned up at a Shearwater show at South by Southwest, I think, and said, ‘Hey, Jonathan, it’s Mike Ryan. I wanted to tell you that I think you really did the right thing,’” says Mr. Meiburg. “I could have kissed him.”