Gold Connections

In 2021, Will Marsh pressed pause on his music career, packed his bags and headed to New Orleans to pursue an MFA. Pandemic brain had firmly set in, so while Marsh dove headfirst into his work with Habitat for Humanity, he also found himself dazed and confused amidst a turbulent time in a new home. Music wasn’t at the forefront of his mind…but it was chasing him down.

The result is Fortune, which blends Charlottesville VA attic recordings with six new tracks, fully fleshed out by Popular Fiction/Like A Shadow producer Daniel Levi Goans, the rhythm section from fellow New Orleans band Motel Radio (Eric Lloyd and Andrew Pancamo), and notably, Marsh’s younger cousin, guitarist Fraser Wright–himself based in New Orleans and wielding a degree in music industry at Loyola University.

The group convened at Dockside Studios, right outside of Lafayette, LA on the banks of the Vermillion Bayou, to record. The environment cast a shadow and set the mood quickly. “I can feel ‘mojo’ when it knocks me on the head,” Marsh says. “Dockside has it.”

Wright recalls the feeling of listening back to Fortune as it unfolded, hunched over Dockside’s studio monitors: “All these songs had the same tension and contrast as the environment they were written and recorded in. Heavy but also bright.”

On Fortune, you hear the sound of a band reborn–you hear the sounds of fortune, of fate, of the Holy Spirit and the Mississippi River, the James River, Bayou St. John, the Vermillion Bayou. It’s all here.