The Collection (CANCELLED)

CANCELLATION NOTICE // "As many of you have seen by now, our local community of Asheville, WNC, and surrounding areas have been decimated by Hurricane Helene. I have never experienced anything like this in my life - everywhere I walked around my house, trees were destroyed, power lines laying in the middle of the street, houses floating down the river. There’s no cell service, a million people without power (including me), no internet, and no water (and it is expected to take 4-5 weeks to be fixed). This means that, people are without resources AND can’t contact each other.

I luckily was able to find a way out of Asheville using back roads to get to Winston Salem today.

But we’ve only heard from our sweet drummer once in all this mess, enough to know he’s  okay, but we are unsure of much more.

WNC is home to some of us, home to our family and friends, home to our houses, and it is so hard to comprehend the enormity of this loss. With that it mind, it feels impossible for us to continue on with tour. Our priority is to make sure Joshua can get to safety, that our friends and family have the resources they need, and that we can help rebuild our community. That is all very hard to figure out when communication with each other is next to impossible with the outages.

We are very sad to not be able to finish out tour - it’s been such a joy to play for you and to finish this season together with love. But, for us, finishing out this season with love means being here with each other through the struggle and decimation of our local community. We hope to pull together one last NC show, potentially even make up a few other shows if we can, but for now, our focus is here. We’ll share more when we can. 

With love, David, Hayden, Graham, Joshua, Sarah, Joshua "

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Little Deaths is a nuanced, emotional and intimate step inward for the otherwise hyperbolic band The Collection, the North Carolina-based indie-pop band founded by frontman David Wimbish.

In their time together, the tightly knit, six members of The Collection have inspired listeners with their raucous, folk-based indie-pop sound, resulting in an unabashed positivity and participatory spirit of shared celebration, creating an almost congregational connection with their audience. The Collection built their familial fan base over three independent albums, 2014’s full-length debut Ars Moriendi, Listen To The River [2017] and Entropy [2018]. The latter featured “Beautiful Life,” and its 8.7 million-and-counting Spotify streams, earning the band praise from American Songwriter, Glide, Parade and more, even landing on NPR Tiny Desk Judges’ Picks This was bolstered by the band’s riotous and righteous shows touring with the likes of Oh Hello, RIPE, Tall Heights and Sammy Rae & Friends.

Their 2023 EP and first effort with Nettwerk, How to Survive an Ending was a post-pandemic roadmap of resolve and celebrating the moment.

With Little Deaths, however, Wimbish writes about the aches, joys and acceptance of deeply personal growth. The progression of the band’s sound, he says, is palpable. “Our last record was triumphant,” he says. “Little Deaths is about vulnerability.”

Key to that vulnerability was Wimbish’s decision to get sober during the pandemic. “I’d been isolated and drinking a lot, and I realized I’d lost any sense of presence in the moment,” he explains. “When I got sober, I realized the best — and worst — thing about it was that I felt all my feelings. I felt really vulnerable.”

Factor in pandemic isolation, and Wimbish was faced with an almost existential urgency writing what would become Little Deaths. “I had about 200 ideas, mostly just voice memos when I started. But if I was going to develop an idea, I had to ask myself, ‘Do I believe this in my core? You’re going to sing these songs every night and you have to be able to feel it in your soul’,” Wimbish says, adding, “Sometimes I need to write songs just to kick myself in the butt.”

And kick he did. With his five bandmates spread out all over North Carolina, The Collection’s usually collaborative writing instead fell more to Wimbish alone during lockdown, which allowed him to tap into a hardwon presence and introspection. “I wasn’t relying on everyone else - my vocals and melody had to be front and center and so the songs had to be able to stand on their own,” he explains. “Then I’d send them out to everyone to add their parts.”

“Medication,” the album’s breakout single about overcoming the stigma of needing, asking for and getting mental health help, came from a January 2023 writing retreat in a cabin in Maine. “‘Medication’ came very, very quickly. I woke up one morning, walked downstairs, made a fire,

and just recorded the line, ‘I deserve to be well.’ Then I just broke down crying. I knew when I sang it this was something I needed to believe deep in my soul,” Wimbish says. “I wrote the rest of it that morning.” “Medication” has since become a viral phenomenon, inspiring tearful reaction videos, fan art and covers.

Recording in Nashville with producer Jeremy Lutito (NEEDTOBREATHE, Joy Oladokun, Jars of Clay, etc.) and engineer Reid Leslie created the opportunity to push Little Death’s sound to match the raw vulnerability of the songs by rearranging them with unconventional instruments, from duct- taped pianos to rubber-bridged guitars, giving the songs an intimate immediacy.

The album’s titular intro “Little Deaths,” another song from the Maine writing retreat, is just Wimbish at a piano. Lutito set up an extra microphone to record the sound of Wimbish’s fingers tapping at the keys. He sings about his own transformation, the radical honesty people in recovery use to describe leaving past selves that no longer serve them, with only the faith that things will get better to guide them forward. “I’m still not the person I had hoped for/But no longer who I was/ And maybe all these little deaths are keeping me alive/Like a piece of tired wood underneath ambitious vines.”

It’s a somber, sober way to begin, but it also establishes the vulnerability that shapes the album as Wimbish’s voice at times quivering with the fragility of the moment. “I had a lot of fear recording it that way. It just felt too vulnerable to put on the record,” he admits. “But Jeremy was like, ‘No, that’s it, this is where you need to be to sing these songs.’ I’d come in with this idea that my voice needed to be clean and technically perfect, but this way, it actually feels more like my voice live.” Present, indeed.

Embracing this vulnerability also meant songs were free to take on new, thrilling shapes, as on “The Weather,” about being at an emotionally exhausted low and just hoping that this too, shall pass. “The demo version was me picking through an acoustic guitar and [guitarist Joshua Ling] on an electric, but Jeremy wanted me to play it on a rubber-bridged guitar, which sounds like a cello. Then we used a baritone guitar, which made it deeper, and recorded the bass through a vintage guitar amp,” says Wimbish. “We basically completely deconstructed it, but it was Jeremy’s way of keeping us on our toes instead of just recreating the demo.”

Likewise, “The Come Down,” which navigates a rush of highs and lows musically and thematically, finds Wimbish empathizing with being there for someone experiencing bi-polar mood swings— from the perspective of also suffering from them himself. It is thrilling and at times even jarring, featuring perfectly imperfectly distorted horns.

With its hands-in-the-air deluge of emotion, “Rain it Down” may be the most classic-sounding The Collection-esque song on Little Deaths, but it, too, finds Wimbish tapping into a deep empathy that’s more about trying to accept his flaws than simply celebrating overcoming them. “When my heart starts anticipating a majorly needed change in my life - a breakup, a move, a job - it can take a long time to express it. Fear and anxiety take over, worrying that my needs will hurt others or leave them feeling abandoned. It becomes easy to be closed off and put up walls,” he says. “But often, expressing my truth, breaking the dam, and releasing the flood brings such an intense sense of relief.”

“The Mood” started out as a demo without much of a beat, but found its groove in the studio, the track winding its way around an insistent breakbeat punctuated by horns. Wimbish details

rebounding after a break-up, even though it may not be the best idea: “Break my heart again, I’m already in the mood.”

As one of the hardest songs for the band to write on the album, “Spark of Hope” has a patient, almost timid feel to it that gives its title and message a hard-won feel. “I started to analyze how I feel about life, as someone who is often optimistic about projects, but not about my own mental state or health or future, and realized I don’t feel like someone who drowns in hope, but I’m not void of it either. I always try to at least carry a little spark of it, just enough to see in the darkness, and hope it’s enough to get me through,” he says. “I wrote this song while we were in the studio, after almost a year of trying to write it and failing. It came together in a half hour and we recorded it the next day, with the lights low, during a thunderstorm.”

“Over You” isn’t so much a break-up song as a break-down song, realizing a relationship is over but still not wanting it to be. “It took awhile for us to get this one right, “Wimbish admits. “We recorded it three different times with very different arrangements. But with Jeremy in the studio, it finally found its voice - an ever growing build of emotion that comes crashing back down into a smooth onward momentum.”

Little Deaths shows the band that once wrote songs like “You Taste Like Wine” now sober and self-searching, but even more deeply connected to listeners because of it.

“I want people to relate to the record in a way that they can feel vulnerable listening to it, because sharing that vulnerability makes it easier to talk to each other, and help each other get better,” Wimbish says.

To that end, the band hosted their own music festival, Soil & Sky, in September 2023, on 32 acres of land in rural North Carolina, with plans to make it an annual event. The band plans to include playing a series of house parties to tour in support of Little Deaths, “kind of a potluck thing,” Wimbish says. “Our community tends to have a lot of room for depth and connection, so we’re like, why don’t we create a space of intimacy and connection ourselves?”

With Little Deaths, they already have.

We recollect memories like paintings on the hall of a childhood home. Certain colors and details stick out to us, while others lose their luster over time. Nevertheless, we appreciate what we do remember as it indelibly shaped our present and eventual future. As vocalist, songwriter, producer, and namesake of Mike Mains & The Branches, Mike Mains thinks aloud in his songs. He ponders events and experiences as well as their ensuing effects on his identity, telling intimate stories through artful pop rock. After generating millions of streams and consistently captivating audiences on tour, the band recognize, accept, and absorb these formative mementos on their 2023 fourth full-length offering, Memory Unfixed [Tooth & Nail Records].

“There are two ways of looking at it,” he notes. “I can be resentful, bitter, and angry about a lot of what happened to me growing up, or I could be grateful that I have a life filled with memories. Some of them are broken, and some of them are amazing. I’m fucking here, man. I’m breathing, I’m existing, and I get to make art and share it. On top of that, I have an incredible wife who loves and supports me. If we allow ourselves to become friends with our own unfixed memories, there are lessons we can learn and carry on. I went through a painful period and came out on the other side of it as a better person with a beautiful portrait of that season in the form of the album.”

Mike Mains & The Branches have always bottled complex emotions and relatable stories within hummable homegrown anthems. They have organically progressed over the course of Home [2012], Calm Down, Everything Is Fine [2014], and When We Were In Love [2019]. Billboard hailed the “buoyant pop” of the latter, while Atwood Magazine praised its “upbeat, energetic, feelgood pop-rock.” Among many standouts, “Briggs” generated north of 4.8 million Spotify streams as “Breathing Underwater” and “Live Forever” each surpassed the 1 million-mark. After trading his native Michigan for Nashville, Mike underwent another era of transformation. Stuck at home mid-Pandemic, he retreated inward and began to understand his past and, ultimately, himself a bit more.

“Once COVID hit, I finally had the opportunity to allow some things to start boiling over,” he elaborates. “I got serious about therapy, my mental health, and my well-being. I acknowledged wounds that had been on the backburner for my entire life. I’ve been on my own since I was 16, and I come from a family of physical and mental abuse. By living alone and crashing on couches over the years, I’ve cobbled together a wonderful surrogate family. Growing up, my dad was like, ‘You’ll never make it’. Part of me was pleased to find success, move to Nashville, buy a home, and support myself and my wife off rock ‘n’ roll. Nevertheless, all of this pain came up. So, these songs are little vignettes and snapshots of not only the relationship between my wife and I but what was happening in the world with George Floyd and America’s heartbreaking response.”

To capture these emotions, he reteamed with producer Nathan Horst, but Mike co-produced for the first time. “It was per his suggestion,” adds Mike. “It gave me a lot of courage and confidence to continue taking the reins when it came to my music.”

Now, the band introduce Memory Unfixed with the dual singles “We’re Alive” and “Always My Forever.” On the former, he lyrically sets the scene, “Those streets where we used to ride our bikes haunt me, they’ve been keeping me up at night.” Meanwhile, a buoyant beat and bright guitars underline an unexpectedly triumphant and chantable chorus, “Caught up in these memories, maybe it was more than just a dream, we’re alive.”

“I had some painful things happen to me in my teenage years,” he sighs. “The song goes back to the pain of adolescence, but the explosive joy as well.”

On “Always My Forever,” softly strummed acoustic guitar brushes up against delicate piano as he croons a sweet homage to his wife.

“It celebrates the way I feel about her, but it’s universal enough you can see yourself inside of it,” he continues. “It shows a lot of gratitude for Shannon.”

Then, there’s the upbeat “Talk To Me.” A shuffling riff locks into a head-nodding beat. He threads together relatable, yet obtuse imagery of “characters going through a hard time and trying to navigate life together.”

Co-written with Jason Singer of Michigander and Shannon, “Lonely” channels Pandemic-era isolation into a plea for connection.

“It encapsulates the way the three of us felt during COVID,” he notes. “We were lonely and craved connection.”

The opener “Lost Boys” materialized as the first composition penned for the record. The vocals teem with raw emotion over ethereal echoes of guitar, glowing synths, and a hypnotic backbeat.

“Anybody who grew up in America is familiar with the story of Moses,” he says. “He does what he’s supposed to do and literally dies at the edge of the Promised Land. It’s a powerful metaphor and warning for me. I don’t want to die at the edge of the Promised Land. I don’t want to let my fears, regrets, or mistakes hinder me from entering my own version of the Promised Land. I want to be a loving husband and, someday, father. I want to write songs that can potentially help people.”

In the end, Mike Mains will continue to do just that.

“I’m just a husband, a wounded healer, and a grateful storyteller,” he leaves off. “If these songs make you feel less alone, I did my job.