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Songs We Love: The Lone Bellow, 'Then Came The Morning'

Brooklyn's The Lone Bellow seemed to arrive fully formed: Its self-titled 2013 debut came stuffed with intricately assembled bundles of crowd-pleasing folk-pop, each more dramatic and infectious than the last. Charismatic, photogenic, endlessly hooky — The Lone Bellow has been the complete package since day one.

A follow-up album, Then Came The Morning — produced by The National's Aaron Dessner — comes out at the beginning of 2015, and The Lone Bellow has lost none of its sleekly soaring charm. Listen to the title track here, and you'll hear a band that's climbed the Van Morrison family tree straight to its highest branch.

That said, when writing about "Then Came The Morning," singer Zach Williams points to a different influence altogether:

I was listening to a lot of Vegas-era Elvis when I started writing it. It has tinges of our gospel-music upbringing: The piano melody especially highlights the way my grandmother can bang on her old upright when she sings "Uncloudy Day" every Thanksgiving. We recorded all the vocals together in the old church sanctuary at Dreamland Studios, and Aaron Dessner wrote all the wind, brass and strings with Vegas Elvis in mind.

Then Came The Morningcomes out in January on Descendant Records.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)