That is before we even get into a plethora of extracurricular endeavours (Sun Drawing, Beneather, Boa Resa, Mirrored Daughters, Wintergreen, The Form Group et al); the fellow-travelling artists who regularly appear as contributors off / on stage (such as Melinda Bronstein and members of Firestations); and running the Objects Forever micro-label.
Yet, with such a sprawling web of productivity and creativity, is does feel important for The Leaf Library’s sustainability to make a fully refocused return to mothership operations, to keep all the connections joined-up, as well as to provide late-comers and long-term followers alike with a more portable ‘go-to’ platter, which After The Rain, Strange Seeds consciously sets out to be.
Ploughing lush intricate acres of motorik-pop, pastoral orchestrated ruminations and expansive explorations across its forty-nine-minute runtime, After The Rain, Strange Seeds is both a familiar and recalibrated calling-card for the amorphous world of The Leaf Library, whilst being a strong selection in its own right.
Reeled in via email, around the end of a long-planned UK tour, Leaf Librarians Matt Ashton and Lewis Young generously spared some time to account for the prolonged but rewarding journey running up to the delivery of After The Rain, Strange Seeds, working with John McEntire, side-hustle activities… and much more in-between.Whilst it’s not uncommon these days, to have a lengthy gap between completing the construction of an album and delivering it to the outside world, how does it feel to have finally released After The Rain, Strange Seeds in early 2026, given that you actually recorded it between April 2022 and April 2023?
Matt Ashton: It feels great! There’s a degree of delusion required to get an album finished — it’s a weird thing to spend your time doing and you have to really think that people are going to want to hear it and value it in order to have the energy to get it done, but the flip side of that is that it’s very easy to let the doubt creep in.The longer something goes on from conception to being something real, the harder it is to keep hold of the thread of the idea that you started out with. It’s a long time to have something in your head. But as soon as it’s done and out, it feels great. It’s been so well received it’s a vindication of all that time spent feeling like a mad person.
Was there a lot to contend with along the way and did various interim side releases as well as extracurricular projects ease any frustrations that may have crept in?
Lewis Young: In the space of starting recording this album and it being released I’ve joined / started four additional bands (Beneather, Mirrored Daughters, MOLCH and Boa Resa) [who] released three albums and two EPs [in all] … so yes, many extracurricular projects to ease frustrations from my side. MA: The main things we had to contend with were other people’s schedules and work patterns outside of the group. The bulk of the recording was done between April 2022 and August 2023 — not a huge expanse of time, really. But then the mixing took a long time and, once that was done and we’d found a label, we had to join their queue. Extra projects are always going to happen whether we have a lot on or not, but they certainly helped keep things ticking over for us.We did The Long Dead King EP for Castles In Space, plus its spin-off remix album, as well as a few different solo things here and there, the most fun of which was the Mirrored Daughters album with Mike Cranny from Firestations and [the] singer Marlody. The other thing that helped pass the time was remixing the whole of the new album before the final mixes had even been done.
The resulting thing is called Instrumental Chants + Vertical Threads, and anyone that signs up to our mailing list gets a download of it. Hopefully we’ll be able to put it out as a physical thing at some point in the future. It was incredibly fun to make, completely expectation-free.
How much did the original vision for the assembling the new record evolve over its gestation? Were you determined to stem the sprawl of its official double-LP predecessor The World Is A Bell and to take a more ‘melodies-first’ approach?
MA: Yes, this new album started out, in part, as a reaction against The World Is A Bell, though for us it was more about how we didn’t want to make it, rather than its length. We decided even before TWIAB was finished that the next one was going to be recorded quickly, mixed by someone else (preferably remotely), and be more immediate in its arrangements (as well as being something we could easily play live, which TWIAB is hard to do).
I think some of that has carried through, though we never managed to actually all play together and record live. We did however manage to stick to our ‘mostly live instruments as opposed to synths and laptops’ doctrine. We ended up dropping a few songs from the tracklist when it became clear that we are unable to write a succinct song — we could easily have made another double but, mainly, I was worried about the prospect of finding a label that would take that sort of thing on.Matt, given that you have continued to write the vast bulk of the lyrics, do the core songs for The Leaf Library largely originate from yourself to be fleshed out by the core band or are they added in after composing the music together?
MA: The lyrics almost always come last. They tend to stem from the working titles that I give the sketches at the very beginning, using the syllables of that to start a freeform wordless singalong in order to try and kick something off. This usually happens when I’m out walking the dog, sort of pretending that I’m on a phone call.As Kate sings instead of you, is there much discussion about the words she takes on?
MA: Not unlike Ron Burgundy and the teleprompter, Kate will sing whatever you put in front of her. Actually, she is pretty happy with most of the lyrics most of the time. I can’t think of a point where she has asked for something to be changed, but that might be because I write for her voice. Even though I write by singing, when the actual lyrics come along they have to be something that I can hear being sung by her. I’ve jettisoned a fair few ideas in the past because there’s no way I could imagine Kate coming out with that.
The only other time lyrics are changed is if the words don’t sound great as they’re recorded. “Bright Seas” from The World Is A Bell went through re-writes in the studio as what I had originally down sounded bad on tape.
Are there some recurring or connection lyrical themes across After The Rain…?
The other thing that seems to be running through some of this album is the idea of talking to someone, whether it’s someone I know or maybe myself, that is going through something heavy, or is carrying some sort of emotional weight. I’m not sure whether I’m trying to comfort someone or just acknowledge it, but “Carry A River In Your Mouth”, in particular, seems to speak to someone that is struggling.
What led to John McEntire become involved in the mixing? As a Tortoise fan, was it hard managing to keep his role quiet before making formal LP launch announcements?
I have frequently said that many of the cool things that have happened to us over the years have been a result of just dropping someone a line, and this was a pretty good example. Also yes, really hard — I told pretty much everyone I knew.
I’ve often wondered how artists know when a set of recordings is considered ‘finished enough’ before passing it over to the final mixing stage. Could you explain it from your insider perspective, to the non-musicians amongst us?
LY: One aspect I think stays pretty consistent across our releases is we rarely reach ‘finished enough’ more so ‘overly filled’. We tend to add more ideas than will really fit in the song — then let the mixing / editing phase uncover what elements need focus and what elements don’t.MA: It’s also a lot about when the deadline hits. They’re usually self-imposed (no one is hammering on our door to get an album finished for the Christmas market) — we’re pretty good at getting stuff done and out, rather than tinkering away on it forever. With this album, however, we had a hard deadline when I moved to Finland for a few months. We couldn’t do any more recording after that, and we had promised the album to John for mixing by a certain date because of it. We’ve got quite good at letting things go. Most of the time it’s whether or not I can listen to something several times in a row without flinching at some annoying bit.
Did you have much dialogue with John about what you had in mind or did you just leave him largely to own expert devises? How crucial was his input in the shaping final sound and vision of the record?
MA: As we often do, we wrote a whole essay on where we saw the mixing going, kind of knowing full well that he was going to sit down and press his McEntire buttons. He didn’t return the album we thought we were making when we first set out with the recording, but over time we could see what he was trying to do with it. And the more distance I have from the actual making of it, the more I appreciate how much like his other work it sounds.The songs seem to sit in three broad camps; one densely-packed, live-centric and propulsive (“Colour Chant”, “Still & Moving” and “Catch Up, Isobel”), one more orchestrated (“The Reader’s Lamp”, “Carry A River In Your Mouth” and “Ship In The Sky”) and another more open-ended in-between (“Some Circling” and “There Was A Golden Age”). Are those distinctions you would recognise and if so, do they result from any deliberate decision making around the sequencing and structuring of the whole collection?
MA: No more deliberate than making sure there is a bit of variation on there, and that it does what an album is supposed to do. I’ve not said this much out loud before, but I’ve always loved making mixes and tapes, and I think that has helped a lot in arranging and sequencing albums.
The Iskra Strings quartet feel even more integral than they did on The World Is A Bell. What did you seek to achieve with their contributions? It feels like Jim O’Rourke, Philip Glass and Robert Kirby could all have been points of reference.
MA: Iskra and, equally (if not more so), arranger Daniel Fordham are SO integral to the sound. Both are wonderful to work with –Daniel seems to understand the references I give to him and, more importantly, isn’t afraid to be quite bold with some of the movement and harmonics in the arrangements. As an extension to that, it’s great being able to give that music to James Underwood and his quartet knowing that they will be able to play the parts and bring some character to them.It’s always a joy to be in the studio with them all and see the arrangements come to life. Robert Kirby and Michael Nyman were both big reference points in my original notes to Dan.
You have never appeared precious about acknowledging key influences – such as Yo La Tengo and Stereolab — but do you feel that through longevity you have reached a point where the combinations of inspirations and extended band family chemistry that The Leaf Library as an entity has now settled in something distinctively more than the sum of its parts?
MA: I hope so. We definitely aren’t able to successfully sound like anyone else — it would be nice if people saw us as our own thing that transcended some of the things we borrow from elsewhere. I think live we have our own thing — whether or not we can capture that on record at some point remains to be seen. Double live album time!
Was there much material left-over or set aside that didn’t quite fit the remit and balance of After The Rain, Strange Seeds? Was The Long Dead King EP a byproduct or a separate venture?
LY: Circling back to ‘extracurricular projects’ — we are becoming quite adept at writing another record whilst mixing the current record. 2019’s About Minerals was created whilst we mixed The World Is A Bell. The Long Dead King was created whilst we mixed After The Rain, Strange Seeds. Think there’s something about the sterility of mixing that creates an itch. The need to make something to keep us entertained. It often comes together pretty quickly, not overthinking it too much. Sure there’s some lessons in there somewhere.MA: The Long Dead King was almost entirely written to order, something relatively new to us (aside from [an] old track that we repurposed for it). There were a few tracks that we recorded at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate when Lewis and I started the album but, for mostly space reasons, they did [not] get carried through to the next stage. They’re all good tracks so will either form the beginnings of a new record, or end up coming out in some other form.
Given the time-lags involved with After The Rain, Strange Seeds have you already started some work on its sequel?
LY: We recently applied to the UKAT Fund, a Musicians’ Union-backed venture to help performers fund tours to enable them to continue creating music. It was an eye-opening process — helping us to realise that with some additional funding, we’ve so many projects on the horizon we want to get going with (a full sequel to After The Rain and a follow up to 2020’s Melody Tomb with our friend Teruyuki Kurihara to name but two). We broadly move at a pretty glacial pace with putting projects together — it would be interesting to see how that might change if we had more resources to help.Outside The Leaf Library, you’ve certainly been busy in recent times with your own side-projects as well as running your own Objects Forever micro-label. Do you have else in the pipeline from those routes, once The Leaf Library’s current wave of activity has subsided?
MA: We’d love to do another Mirrored Daughters record if the circumstances allow — the first one was a joy to make. I’d also like to make more albums for both The Form Group and Sun Drawing — both have been started, in very vague ways — but I’m not going to promise anything. It’s impossible for us not to be fiddling about with new ideas in the background, and not all of those will end up as TLL things, so side projects are crushingly inevitable!What do you draw from revisiting your earlier career history with Saloon in the last year or so, principally off the back of your BBC sessions being issued by Precious Recordings? Is there any prospect of further such archival activity in the mid-future?
MA: The main motivation for releasing the Saloon Peel Sessions LP was to be able to share a document of us playing live as there aren’t that many around. Plus, Nick from Precious is such a great guy, it was just a pleasure all round. It was fun looking back for a while, but the process of re-learning some of the songs for the launch gig was a strange one and I’m not sure I’d want to go any deeper than that into the old stuff. It suddenly felt very old, and I was aware of just how far we’d come along in terms of song writing (and playing ability).We plan to carry on with our Library Music series as there is still so much that we’ve done as The Leaf Library that I want to share more widely.
Do you think generally that the era in which you began making music and releasing – that still seems to define a lot of what you do — is undervalued and worthy of wider appraisal?
MA: I think it’s doing pretty well, actually. I’m sat here listening to the new Notwist album, having just worked my way through the new American Analog Set box set. Our community values this music a great deal and is very good at sharing things that have been uncovered that we might have missed the first time around. It’s a generous, open and enthusiastic scene!-Adrian-
