Shearwater's new album, 'The Golden Archipelago,' is meant to be a visual experience as much as a musical one, singer Jonathan Meiburg tells Spinner. In addition to the 11 songs on the album, the Austin, Texas, band is offering a 75-page companion piece called 'The Golden Dossier.' It's a collection of lyrics, drawings, diagrams and photographs the band spent several weeks putting together.

"The idea conceptually was to try to restore some of what we've lost: We've lost album art almost entirely these days," Meiburg says. "With the dossier, the idea was that this would be like a file you'd find buried in a filing cabinet in a deceased professor's office, this set of papers that had been compiled according to some kind of logic that you can't quite make out, but that was deeply personal. And in fact, it is: In a way, I'm the dead professor. It was my filing cabinet that all this stuff got pulled out of, and every one of those images has a story attached to it."

Those stories inform the songs on the record, a sweeping meditation on life on islands, some of which are real and some that are metaphorical. Either way, Meiburg drew from his travels and experiences as an ornithologist in writing the songs.

"I had the title first," he says. "I wrote the title down one day and I thought, since I'd spent a lot of time on islands in the course of research or other travels, there had to be a record in there somewhere. I had to be able to go to those experiences and lift something out of them and make them at least part of what this record was going to be about."

Ultimately, 'The Golden Archipelago' is a concept record, in that it's actually about a concept.

"I'm not interested in having a plot with characters where you need a libretto to understand the record," Meiburg says. "But I do think it's important to have an emotional wholeness to the record, and maybe that the record should have its own iconography and its own little cosmology so it has its own interior world, and feels like it has a beginning and a middle and an end, even if you can't say exactly what it is that's going on.

'The Golden Archipelago' is due Feb. 23 on Matador. 'The Golden Dossier' is available here.