White Lighter

Kyle Morton was 12 or 13 when a tick bite gave him Lyme disease. It went undiagnosed for years, led to multiple organ failures and ended with a kidney transplant from his father. When he started writing White Lighter, which Typhoon released on Roll Call on August 20, 2013, he thought it might be the last thing he ever made. It was a false alarm, he later told NPR, but the record is built around that thought.

Typhoon came up through Portland house shows, but for this album they left town for Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, Oregon, where by Morton’s account they spent six weeks writing, arranging and recording. He built a small fort in a wood barn for his books and guitar and slept a few feet from the recording desk. Paul Laxer, the band’s engineer at home and on tour, recorded it and shares the production credit with Morton and the band. Jeff Stuart Saltzman mixed it and Dave McNair mastered it. As Morton described it to NPR, the shape of the whole record came first, then the words, then arrangements that everyone had a hand in, with whole days given over to horn parts or string loops.

The credits list twelve members, among them two violinists, three trumpet players and two drummers, plus guests: Chris Funk of the Decemberists on pedal steel, Holland Andrews on clarinet and vocals, and Yann Tiersen, whom Typhoon had toured with in 2010, playing the violin that ends “The Lake”. Morton’s notes call the songs “pressure points”, the most significant or traumatic moments of his life, set out “in the cold, white light of mortality”. The title comes from the moth and the flame. Morton has talked about a light so bright that it hides every other source and draws you towards what will destroy you, and the second track is called “Artificial Light”. Rick Delucco’s cover, a moth on a red splash, started from Morton’s question of how a moth would look if it could evolve as fast as people change its surroundings.

“Young Fathers” was one of the hardest songs to get right. Morton told NPR he wasn’t sure it would work but never considered cutting it, and Stephen Thompson, playing it on Here & Now, set its whispered passages against the loud ones. Its lyric is about what one generation leaves the next: “They cured the cancer, but discovered a new plague.” “Dreams of Cannibalism” has a narrator insisting he is not a criminal, who fled the country only to build “the same damn house” on every acre and ends picturing everyone dancing at his funeral. “Possible Deaths” opens with “Every star is a possible death.” On stage in Boston, Morton introduced “Morton’s Fork” as being paralysed by two equally bad choices, something he had faced himself. “Hunger and Thirst” borrows the name of the band’s 2010 album and, he said, is about making records and what he will do once one finally satisfies him.

Critics agreed on the contrast. NPR’s Bob Boilen, who streamed the album in First Listen, said it made good on the band’s early promise and heard joy in the playing set against dark words. Paste gave it 8.0 and called it “both warning and celebration of mortality”. Willamette Week’s Matthew Singer thought the arrangements nearly swallow the band and that Morton’s voice is what holds it together. American Songwriter ran two reviews, both at 3.5 out of 5; in one, Sean L. Maloney found it twee at first and then heard how angry it is underneath. AllMusic gave it four stars. It reached No. 105 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on Heatseekers, NPR listeners voted it 28th of the year, and “Young Fathers” made NPR Music’s 100 favourite songs of 2013.

The size could have swamped these songs, and it doesn’t. Thirteen tracks run just under 47 minutes, two of them interludes of less than a minute, and the long songs are built in sections rather than as one big swell. What keeps it from turning into spectacle is that the darkness is tied to specifics: an illness that took his childhood, a dilemma that shares his surname, a moth that cannot adapt in time. Morton told NPR there was no despair in it, just that “sometimes it’s easier to make sense of one’s life in the shadow of death.” In 2023, two albums later, Typhoon reissued it for its tenth anniversary with a new song, “Reed Rd”.