ABOUT

Stars wheel overhead, bursting and dying and forming. Celestial bodies, anchored by ancient orbits, careen through space. Here on Earth, bodies need tending, hearts need mending. Sometimes it seems that the long night will never end. But stars and planets remind us: change is the only constant.

Humbird’s fourth full-length album, Morning When It Comes, is a promise made in the midst of a long night. With glittering hooks, big-hearted grooves, and clear-voiced melodies that cut straight to the truth, Humbird offers twelve new secular hymns that draw inspiration from the cosmos above to comfort us in our humanity down below.

For lead songwriter Siri Undlin (she/her), this album first took shape as a set of poetic compasses for navigating mental and physical illness. “I found certain melodies and rhymes to be like North Stars,” she notes, the songwriting process functioning as a balm and a map for reckoning with internal worlds of pain and discomfort. This process isn’t new for Undlin: whether singing as a kid in school stairwells, around the kitchen table with family, conducting extensive folklore and musical research worldwide as a Watson Fellow, or touring through the US and EU/UK on the heels of her 2024 album Right On, music has always been her tool for navigating the world. “I wrote these songs when I was really sick, and it could've very easily been a really depressing album,” she says. “But in the studio, it was important to all of us to find the ways these songs could harness mischief and exuberance – not to downplay the density of the emotions, but to represent the complexity and contradictions that occur on any given day of our lives.” Recording Morning When It Comes with trusted collaborators in Eau Claire, Wisconsin transformed these twelve self-soothing songs into a bigger, more universal conversation about stability, surrender, and the power of being in community.

Now, Undlin and Humbird deliver an even deeper distillation of the lush, electrified, hook-driven Midwest Americana that audiences have come to expect from their performances. As Undlin steps intentionally into the role of co-producer for the first time, she constructs this sonic world with longtime producer Shane Leonard and regular contributor Pat Keen (bass, synth, piano, wurly, pump organ), along with pedal steeler Rich Hinman (Sara Bareilles, Rosanne Cash, Cyndi Lauper) and Eau Claire collaborators Luke Callen, Sarah Elstran (The Nunnery), Sarah Krueger (Lanue), and Sarah Magill (Quiet Takes). The result is a sound that knows itself; trusts itself to play and feel joy, even as it braves pain and hardship. That confidence gives us permission to trust our own footing, to revel in our own joy as we do, in fact, survive.

“Daughter of Empire,” the album’s opening track, begins the twelve-song cycle mired in the mundane and more devastating aspects of trying to outlast late-stage capitalism: bread goes stale and late fees stack up on the kitchen table while the news screams about government coups and war. What matters most gets delayed in favor of doomscrolling and dissociating. But when the chorus opens into 70s-style acoustic guitar shimmering over warm percussive grooves, frustration and self-disappointment transform into a catchy, sardonic folk-pop hook that lends levity and grace: “Daughter of empire / still kicking that can / But someday soon / I will be the better man.”

Morning When It Comes often explores the transformations possible when the personal is placed beside the universal. Notable tracks in this vein include “Hey Big Dipper,” a lullaby sung directly to the constellation Ursa Major in a moment of feeling stuck; “Different Speeds,” a contemplative swirl that reveals how the small moments of our days can become our whole universe when we stop to pay attention; and “Blood Moon,” a soothing anthem that utilizes gentle dissonance and satisfying resolution to reflect the ups and downs of chronic illness as the moon keeps watch. Cycles of love, of a year, of bodies human and celestial, all create an orbit for Morning When It Comes to follow faithfully. When we arrive at the final, titular track with its simple beauty and unhurried arrangement, we have been led through transformations of our own, and are now ready to sing this morning hymn with Undlin and believe its every word: “On this long dark night / My wish for you / Is a good night’s sleep / And a clear-eyed view / Of the morning when it comes.”

The tides of change are hard to ride out. The long nights of winter are difficult to endure. For loyal fans and new listeners alike, Morning When It Comes is a companion for everyday earthly life within an infinite and expanding universe that reminds us transformation is divine; that no darkness lasts forever — and that we only need sing a note, reach out a hand, or look to the stars above to find the light we need to hold on till morning.