Though the West Bend, Wis., folk duo gave their second album of gypsy dirges and Appalachian laments the loaded title <em>From the Mouths of the Middle Class</em>, they insist they\'re not a political band. \"We leave the politics to Green Day and U2,\" says Donivan Berube, who splits singer/songwriter duties in the group with his girlfriend Jacquelyn Beaupre\'. The title, he says, is a nod to the job where the two first met.<br /><br />\"We\'re both still working at that same restaurant,\" Berube says. “If you\'ve ever worked in a restaurant, you know that it\'s very stressful. It\'s a lot of work, and it\'s not high paying. It\'s 30 or 40 hours a week that we\'re working for the middle class, so we\'re familiar with that feeling of struggling. It just kind of happened that these songs all just happen to click around central themes of struggles and hardships and the times we\'re living in.”<br /><br />Like many of the best folk albums of the last decade, <em>From the Mouths</em> is an insular affair with a distinct sense of place. Berube and Beaupre self-recorded and self-produced it in their shared apartment over the course of the last winter, writing their songs separately then fleshing them out together with banjo, accordion, glockenspiel and flute and other instruments they had taught themselves to play. It was a long process—\"I was probably camped in front of the computer for three months; we must have listened to the record two, three, four thousand times as we edited it,\" Berube says, and it\'s unclear if he\'s exaggerating—but it passed the time. \"It was such an insane winter,\" Berube recalls. \"I think we only had one real snow day, but it was so cold the whole time you couldn\'t even go outside and play in it. It was such a long winter. We were just looking forward to being able to start touring the whole time.\"<br /><br />That restlessness saturates these songs. \"How I long to hang our clothes on the line,\" Berube sings on the album closer \"Winter Sister.\" Elsewhere his cabin fever spurs more dramatic fantasies. \"By Song Through The Americas\" and \"Smoky Mountain Relapse (Nashville, Let Us Sleep)\" imagine long journeys through the South. Though these treks are fraught with burdensdifficult terrains, compounding debts and general sacrificethey reflect a pervasive yearning for adventure, or a desire to be somewhere else. <br /><br />These songs of transience also ring with autobiographical themes for Berube, particularly \"By Song Through the Americas,\" which can be read as a metaphor for the songwriter\'s move from his childhood home in Florida to Wisconsin three years ago. Berube\'s long, snowy drive to the north portended a bigger break from his past than he likely realized at the time. He\'d been raised a Jehovah\'s Witness, but about a year after his move he excommunicated himself from the church, a decision that meant disassociation from most of his friends and family when he was just 18 years old.<br /><br />\"I had two sisters that had already made the decision as well, so I\'m allowed to still talk to them,” he explains, \"but it was like saying goodbye to my parents, saying goodbye to them while they were still alive and kicking. It\'s strange that they see it as their spiritual duty to not associate with me, or even to talk to me, though I\'ve tried. My dad\'s been having a lot of health issues, so I try to check up on them and make sure they\'re OK, but my mom\'s not going to call me and tell me about it. So that song was probably the last I wrote for the album. I guess I was trying to capture the feeling of leaving your family behind.\"<br /><br />Blessed Feathers is touring currently touring as a four-piece with drummer Jordan Knowles and multi-instrumentalist Steev Baker. They\'ll play a free album release show Sunday, Sept. 25 at the Candlelight Collective, 258 N. Main St., in West Bend. <em>From the Mouths of the Middle Class</em> is available on vinyl for pre-order through <a href=\"http://blessedfeatherslp.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-mouths-of-the-middle-class\">Listening Party</a>. You can stream it now on <a href=\"http://blessedfeatherslp.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-mouths-of-the-middle-class\">Bandcamp</a>.<br /><br /> <iframe height=\"410\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"300\" style=\"position: relative; display: block; width: 300px; height: 410px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=1220011687/size=grande3/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=070808/\" allowtransparency=\"true\"><a href=\"http://blessedfeatherslp.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-mouths-of-the-middle-class\">From the Mouths of the Middle Class by Blessed Feathers</a></iframe><br />
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