JASON HAWK HARRIS

There are places in this world where the veil between Heaven and Earth is permeable, where it’s possible to catch a glimpse of the infinite with both feet still firmly planted on the ground. In Celtic folklore, these spots are known as “thin places,” and though the term is often associated with physical locations—holy sites, natural wonders, works of art—pilgrimages aren’t always required to experience them. Sometimes, if you’re open to something greater than yourself, if you’re willing to surrender to the transcendent, a thin place comes to you. Jason Hawk Harris knows; he’s been living in one for the last five years.

“The process of grieving my mother’s death, of watching my life kind of fall apart around me brought me to this weird sort of nirvana,” he explains. “In those moments, I could feel these different worlds colliding around me, and I knew I wanted to find a way to capture it.”

With his extraordinary new album, Thin Places, Harris has done precisely that. Written from start to finish as one continuous artistic statement, the nine-track collection draws on Harris’ extensive background in classical music to create a genre-defying work of beauty, pain, and catharsis, one that blurs the lines between roots, country, rockabilly, gospel, soul, and chamber folk as it reckons with forces far beyond our control. The songs here are deeply personal, staring down loss, self-destruction, and recovery with unflinching honesty, and the arrangements are similarly bold and cinematic, conjuring up immersive sonic worlds that can feel at once familiar and unsettling, comforting and eerie. Add it all up and you’ve got a bold, bittersweet testament to the complicated legacies we inevitably leave behind, a profoundly moving exploration of the gray areas and liminal spaces—between light and dark, between hope and despair, between life and death—that shape us all.

A Houston native, Harris moved to Los Angeles at 18 to study classical theory and composition before embarking on a stint playing guitar in folky five-piece The Show Ponies. When the band parted ways, Harris released his first solo EP, 2017’s Formaldehyde, Tobacco and Tulips, which helped land him a deal with renowned indie label Bloodshot Records for his widely celebrated 2019 full-length debut, Love & The Dark, which garnered praise everywhere from Rolling Stone to Billboard.