The Mynabirds Be Here Now

The Mynabirds' new album, Be Here Now, is a collection of 9 songs written and
recorded in just 2 weeks in January 2017 following the Inauguration and the Women's
March. Singer Laura Burhenn worked with producer Patrick Damphier in his Nashville
studio (which he was being evicted as the neighborhood began to gentrify, old
warehouses turning to tech offices and luxury condos) to document the news and
peoples' intense emotional responses to it all in real time. No stranger to politics in her
songwriting, Laura aimed to speak from the voice of the collective consciousness in a
work of "Emotional Journalism," singing the heartbreak, anger, exhaustion and resolute
hope she witnessed during the Muslim travel ban, the +nal stand at Standing Rock, and
every other news story that rattled America in that period. The album vacillates in style
and feel to reflect a frayed nation, featuring a Burundian refugee choir on one song, and
a cacophony of dissonant saxophones in a new national anthem on another. It is the last
recording made in that space.