![]() ![]() Joyous moments stand shoulder to shoulder with deep aching, the pains of change and the distant melancholy of old love. ![]() There are no endless summers in the songs of SUSTO, but fleeting moments in the sun, made all the more precious by their transience. Justin’s music is more than capable of evoking beautiful imagery, and often does, but never in a way that could be considered dishonest. Many songs on My Entire Life are classic SUSTO: revelatory, unapologetically grand, and bathed in a ragged youthfulness. The album’s title track features a solo by guitarist Johnny Delaware, recorded outside, with the sounds of his instrument bouncing off the walls of the valley. My Entire Life was recorded in locales ranging from Echo Mountain Studio in Asheville to a “recording pilgrimage” in the Mexican village of Tepoztlan, the mythical birthplace of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, where the band stayed in a house in the valley surrounded by pyramid-capped dome mountains. However, this album in particular comes off as the strongest yet, both sonically and thematically. Likewise, each SUSTO album morphs in ways that are difficult to grasp. Each successive ring bears the marks of winters survived and animals provided asylum. As signifiers of growth, it would be about as useful to compare tree rings in terms of quality. It’s hard to compare SUSTO albums, as each is an honest artifact of a specific point in Justin’s life. The last two years also brought about SUSTO’s new album, My Entire Life. It’s been nine years since that first album, two years since 2021’s album Time in the Sun, and there've been plenty of new situations for Justin to write about - including a painful divorce as a new father, the complete rebuilding of his band after COVID, and reconciling with the ramifications of mental illness and drug use in his family. Life is like a series of refinding yourself in new situations.” And I know I'm not the only person who's ever felt those things or feels those things on a regular basis. “I'm discovering that this is kind of part of life. “But then it ended up just becoming the band's name, because this is how I write songs it's kind of like trying to express this state of ongoing susto,” Justin said. He had recently learned about the term “susto” from a cultural anthropology class he had taken, and named the album after it. Justin said the first SUSTO record was his first attempt as a songwriter to “describe what I felt like I was going through” after turning away from lifelong religious perspectives. So, susto can be understood as a reaction to the impermanence of life. “Susto” is a Latin American folk illness, a belief that a period of startling or drastic change can induce illness in patients. Justin’swriting, informed by the confessional work of poets such as Robert Lowell, walks a wonderful fine line between the idiosyncratic and the universal.Įvery aspect of SUSTO, from the lyrical themes to the band’s name, is emblematic of the central theme being expressed: change. To write an emotionally resonant song is to work with the fundamental materials of life and shape them into something that can be grasped. There’s a power in the ability to remove a song from the context of its creation and still create a connection with the listener. In this land we’re just traveling through. They say we’re all pilgrims, we’re all strangers Although the songs’ subject matter rarely strayed from the southern United States, I still associate SUSTO’s early work, specifically the song “Black River Gospel,” with the volcanic fields of northern Iceland, orange lighthouses dotting fjord headlands and multicolored wooden fishing boats docked in ancient bays. Poignant poetry was always what propelled those folk and country rock tunes, which would have held their own even without the deft lyricism. There was a sense of something deeper in SUSTO’s music. I had a few friends, and no one I could confidently call an ex-lover, but the words spoke to me. My uncles and I took a purple Airbus from Baltimore to Reykjavik, stole a few of the budget airline’s novelty barf bags, rented a car with a tent on the top, and climbed cautiously into the deep mountains. I had just graduated from high school, my uncles had just gotten married, and flights to Iceland were under $100. I was sitting in the back seat of a Ford Escape, crammed between two massive suitcases full of clothes, squeeze tuna, bread, and Safeway peanut butter and jelly. “Friends and lovers, ex-lovers or whatever,” SUSTO’s frontman, Justin Osborne, sang through my earbuds. ![]()
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