Haven (Book) - InkSpot.Com

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Haven

I first discovered this band ten years ago, thanks to another blogger's "Invalid Item"

entries.

One of my favorite aspects of running "Invalid Item"

is constantly discovering new music that others love, and this band really stood out to me. At first I just listened to their song "Stutter" on repeat, but as I read more about the band, I realized that they do a lot of really interesting stuff with their music; mostly in the form of concept albums. "Stutter" was from their 2011 album titled Ever After which is based on the idea of a fairytale. The songs on that album have no pause between the tracks, and the songs, the album's booklet, and the music videos all tell one cohesive narrative fairytale story. It was a really cool idea for an album, and even though I didn't love all their choices, I thought it was executed really creatively.

This album, which was released in 2024, is another concept album. This time, they built it around Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey. Lead singer Josh Ramsay (who wrote and produced the entire album), each song is their interpretation of one point in the Hero's Journey that Joseph Campbell lays out in his work. Ramsay married that with autobiographical details from his own life, and the band envisioned the album as being influenced by all walks of life and highlighting the real inner struggles that so many people experience when they receive a call to adventure. This ended up in the album having to be rewritten and revised multiple times, but I think the end result is something that, like Ever After, is super interesting and has a bunch of songs that really resonate with me.

I originally considered trying to tie all of my entries for this challenge together into one comprehensive narrative (like my ill-fated attempt with Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight album last year), but I think I'm more intrigued by the idea of standalone stories that feature characters and situations about a specific point in the Hero's Journey. There are enough longer works that use the Hero's Journey as a template, so I'm curious to explore what it's like to have only a couple thousand words each to explore the individual steps addressed by these songs, like "crossing the threshold" and "the road back."


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