Everything old is new again.
Take, for instance, the last two albums by the all-vocal ensemble Windborne. Both the 2016 album “Song on the Times” and this year’s “Of Hard Times & Harmony” see the past reflected in the present.
“In 2016 we were thinking about the state of the world and some of the injustices that we were seeing in that world. And we found this song called “Song on the Times …” singer Jeremy Carter-Gordon said. “It was written in the 1840s but it just talks about all these issues that feel so relevant and so current in that point in 2016.”
The title track from the 2016 album talks about income inequality, social support nets being taken away and factory owners not paying their workers fair wages.
“We were like, ‘wow this is a song that is 170 years old, and yet it feels like it’s talking about what we’re seeing in the modern conversation.’ And we just kept finding those songs,” he said.
“So there’s a lot of songs that come from past movements for labor rights, for environmental justice. There’s a piece that talks about urban sprawl and … environmental destruction that was written in 1850.”
While connected to the past, these struggles are still very current.
“And we’re sort of drawing those threads through from the past to today. Sometimes we change the words to update the songs or write new lyrics for that,” Carter-Gordon said. “But it’s this combination of past and present.
“It might be a song that was written 10 years ago, it might be a song that was written in the 1960s — a lot of people think about protest songs in the 1960s — but it might also be something that was written in the 1660s.”
These songs that focus on human rights, social and environmental justice are among those the Massachusetts ensemble will perform at 7 p.m. Nov. 19 at Hinsdale Unitarian Church as part of its Acoustic Renaissance concert series.
“We sing songs from a variety of traditions and cultures that have harmony singing or polyphonic singing traditions in a number of languages,” Carter-Gordon said.
Praised by NPR, BBC and more for its blend of voices, Windborne shares the stories behind the songs on its albums and during its concerts.
“Because there are so many stories that go along with these songs, audiences can expect to not just hear the music but hear the stories in the context of where the songs are coming from, because some of them have really amazing history behind them,” Carter-Gordon said. “That’s so much the case that for our past two albums, the album has been released inside a small book.
“We say that we’re recovering academics and when we go to write liner notes we just kept writing and writing and writing and then all of a sudden there’s a book,” he said. “We added a bunch of art, we added the lyrics, we added illustrations, and we added essays that talk about the themes that we’re discussing.”
While they joke about being recovering academics, all four members — who met at a singing camp called Village Harmony and started singing together as a hobby — came from different career backgrounds and never planned on being full-time musicians.
“Then in 2017 we had a video of us singing a protest song from the 1800s outside of Trump Tower in New York,” Carter-Gordon said. “That short video went viral and all of a sudden people were reaching out to us from all over the country and in fact around the world asking when we were touring to their area because this was music that they felt was really important.”
At the time Carter-Gordon was studying for his Ph.D. in anthropology of dancing. Lauren Breunig was a circus artist doing aerial silks and trapeze, Lynn Rowan was a voice teacher and music educator and her husband, Will Rowan, was a chorale conductor.
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“We all had totally different careers and we hadn’t set out to become full time musicians but that sort of prompted us to answer the call and start touring around,” Carter-Gordon said.
In addition to encouraging the ensemble to tour, the fans also gave their support for the last two CDs.
“We are an independent band. We’re not working with a label so when we’ve done these projects, it’s all been crowd funded by our fan base,” Carter-Gordon said. “For the CD in 2016, nearly 3,000 people preordered the album.
“It feels like it fits with our ethos as a band which is that it’s people-powered music. It’s the community rather than the label that’s enabling us to do what we’re doing,” he said. “During the (early part of the) pandemic we were able to continue being musicians really because of our Patreon community that was sustaining us and also sort of giving an artistic and emotional outlet for continuing to create work even when we couldn’t be performing live shows.”
Now, they are happy to be back on the road. Just recently the ensemble performed in Portugal at this year’s Worldwide Music Expo, known as WOMEX, as one of 30 invited groups to showcase.
“As a result of that there looks like there’s a whole landscape of global touring that’s opening up for us,” Carter-Gordon said.
Never did he imagine that one day he would be touring the world performing for audiences, he said. The group started as friends who like to sing together and that grew up in communities that sing together for fun.
“That was our upbringing. The dream of being professional musicians hadn’t necessarily really occurred to me,” he said. “But there just seems to be a real hunger for this type of music. There’s so little all-vocal music these days.”
While there’s there are classical vocal ensembles and collegiate a cappella groups that are doing pop songs, “this place of sort of all-vocal music that is using a traditional cannon and playing with it in really interesting ways, we’re sort of the only group that’s doing that these days,” Carter-Gordon said.
“That seems to really be exciting for audiences and we’re looking forward to this whole upcoming Midwest tour and bringing some of that to new people.”
Windborne
When: 7 p.m. Nov. 19
Where: Hinsdale Unitarian Church, 11 W. Maple. St., Hinsdale
Tickets: $20
Information: 630-941-7797; acousticren.com
Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.