Stream: Isaac Watters, ‘Listen to the Wind’

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Isaac Watters (Photo by Isabella Behravan)

Issac Watters — John Isaac Watters if you knew his music back in the day, Rainstorm Brother if you followed him into that wilderness — has returned with his first new music in three years.

Known for cinematic, electro-baked and boundary-stretching folk, Watters draws lyrically vivid landscapes to accompany his soundscapes. Often he sketches forlorn places wrought with peril — territory that seems to occupy more acreage these days. And, having gone a few rounds with the pandemic and its reverberations, Watters sounds a wee bit woozy on the new single, “Listen to the Wind.” Fires, floods, rising oceans, crumbling mountains and, yes, armageddon — they all test Watters’ quavering baritone.

The song is the first from Watters’ forthcoming EP, “Extended Play 001,” (out Nov. 9) and his first for analog-focused Hi-Res Records. The song came out of a writing session with label co-founder Matt Linesch, and it references news accounts of the man who set himself on fire on the steps of the Capitol to draw attention to climate change. The photographer who captured the image reported that the man did not scream.

Watters found it tragic and symbolic.

“The cool breeze is harder to find,” he says. “The mountain air seems rarer and farther away. More and more trees are going up in smoke and sometimes it feels like nature itself is in shock, on fire, and not screaming, except for the wind. The wind is screaming. It’s a reminder to get off our screens and out of our heads and back to basics, back to nature.”

||| Stream: “Listen to the Wind”

||| Live: Isaac Watters performs Sunday night at Club Tee Gee.

||| Previously: “Fire You Light” (Rainstorm Brother), “If I Were the Smoke” (Rainstorm Brother), “Past Hope Now,” “Drivin’,” “Outside the Bar in Winter,” “Houses Filled With Light”