You got miles and miles before you, baby,
Let the mystery remain.
Unknowing – singer/songwriter Kevin Prchal’s fourth full-length album – finds the Chicago-area musician grappling with our historical moment while finding some solace in the enigmas of life. The world has changed since the release of his last album, Love & Summer, five years ago. From political turmoil and social upheaval to a quickening climate crisis and a global pandemic, trouble is everywhere outside his door. Yet at home, life has changed for the better: In 2018, he and his wife welcomed a daughter into their family. Unknowing strives to come to grips with a world in which such private joy can coexist with such public pain. Rather than try to wring truths from the experience of the past years, however, Prchal seeks instead to come to peace with the mysteries surrounding him.
In this sense, Unknowing marks a departure from the unbridled exuberance of Love & Summer. Throughout Love & Summer, Prchal lingers languorously in the eddies of passing time, basking in the present before he is swept along again. In Unknowing, he has returned to the main currents of time. No longer suspended, history surrounds him, and in songs like “Cross,” “The Whole World is Burning,” “Gimme a Miracle,” and “American Oblivion,” he gestures towards the problems plaguing our country, from environmental destruction to a national identity crisis. But instead of turning away, Unknowing confronts our historical crises directly, acknowledging the disorientation and confusion many of us feel while mapping out a route forward. “We’re either sinking or we’re raging / Nobody here is seeing clear,” he sings. “But I’m carrying on, / It’s in my blood. / I’m carrying on, / Not giving up.”
Foremost among these crises is the COVID-19 pandemic. Prchal began writing in March 2020 and finished recording in February 2022. While few of the songs address it head-on, the pandemic lurks around the edges of the album, shaping the music in subtler ways. Production is one: Unknowing is in many ways a remote album. The drums, vocals and guitar parts were recorded at Sound Summit in Naperville, Illinois, working closely with collaborators Charlie Dresser and Adam Krier, but the rest of the album – everything from violin, mandolin, and banjo to piano, horns, bass, synth, and back-up vocals – were recorded remotely by musicians scattered around the country. Many of those parts were recorded by the album’s chief producer, Dan Duszynski (Any Kind, Loma) at his studio in Dripping Springs, Texas. Unknowing registers the impacts of the pandemic through its inspirations, most prominently among them John Prine, who died of COVID-19 in April 2020.
Prchal draws on a multitude of styles, transforming them into a sound uniquely his own. Unknowing is a lush, country-inflected soundscape representing a confluence of American musical traditions and tendencies, from the roots-rock harmonies of The Band and the mournful pedal steel of ‘70s-era Neil Young to the hard-charging, organ-and-choir dynamism of Aretha Franklin. The most notable addition in terms of instrumentation are the horns – saxophone and trumpet, courtesy of Teagen Kiel and Kamal Talukder – which provide Unknowing with an E Street swagger reminiscent of early Bruce Springsteen. The result is an album of Whitmanian reach, one that weaves diverse strands of musical Americana into a single tapestry.
Anchoring every track is Prchal’s voice – pure, clear, and powerfully sincere. Throughout the album, he is supported by backup singers like the Burlock Sisters, but only one other singer shares a song with him: his wife Aly, who joins Prchal to sing a verse on “New Valentine.” Ebullient and high-spirited, the song is an ode to their daughter and captures the breathless, expansive joy felt by a mother and father in the presence of their new child: “It’s not the wine that’s got me glowin’ / And I know you know it’s true, / It’s the way she puts her little hand in mine. / I’ll love you for forever, / But for now I can’t deny, / I got a new valentine.”
“New Valentine” is the only song explicitly addressed to Prchal’s daughter, but in many ways the entire album is a gift to her. Rather than processing the past like Sorrow Sings, or exulting in the present like Love & Summer, Unknowing is resolutely forward-looking, gathering the wisdom Prchal has gained and bequeathing it to her. The world is beset by public calamity, personal tragedy, and glaring injustice, he suggests, but it’s also a space of miracles – chief among them, the miracle of new life. Rather than trying to plumb the depths of the universe, he counsels his daughter – and us – we must be open to its mysteries. “My Mother calls her a miracle, / and I like to think that’s true. / But I don’t think much about it lately, / I’m done looking for the proof.”
Pre-order “Unknowing” at Bandcamp.