The first sound you hear on Shearwater's new album, 'The Golden Archipelago,' is a sample of the Bikini national anthem, sung by exiles from the atoll in the South Pacific where the United States conducted nuclear tests from 1946-58. The recording from 1998 helped inspire much of what follows on 'The Golden Archipelago,' Shearwater singer and songwriter Jonathan Meiburg tells Spinner.

"I felt like the record just opened up for me after I listened to this recording," he says. "It felt like the key to the album in some way." He included the lyrics in the 75-page companion piece, 'The Golden Dossier,' and he marvels at the mix of sorrow and joy in a song sung by people who literally cannot go home.


"This ability music has to transform sorrow to joy, or to some third state that's both, it's really the most mysterious and alchemical thing about music," Meiburg says. "So I thought for the album that I not only wanted to explore the story of what had happened to these people, but also that particular emotional state."

The result is an album of songs both soaring and intimate, with a constantly shifting narrative perspective on 11 songs that take place on islands both literal and metaphorical. That soaring sound is no accident.

"One thing that was really important to me in the recording process was that we use a giant room to record in, a room where you can set the microphones a long ways away from the players and capture the sound in that way," Meiburg says. "That gives it a depth and a real feeling that you can't manufacture using boxes."

He and the band also wanted a livelier feel than on Shearwater's previous album, 2008's 'Rook.'

"We really wanted to push the emotional range of the band a lot, in a way that was more like how our live shows are," Meiburg says. "I like 'Rook' a lot, but I think it's fairly sedate and tranquil, and this record I wanted to be anything but that."

'The Golden Archipelago' is due Feb. 23 on Matador.