When Other Lives emerged from Stillwater, Oklahoma, their sweeping, cinematic arrangements and haunting, wistful melodies had an extra side effect: the uncanny ability to evoke big skies and broad horizons, as if the band’s DNA was the wide-open space of their home state’s prairies. Breaking through with their 2011 album Tamer Animals, MOJO magazine labelled Other Lives, “The next must-have pastoral American sensation”, and judging by their new album, For Their Love, Other Lives have continued to grow: it’s their most evocative, awestruck and intimate record yet, invested with a new vein of poetic thought addressing the individual and society in these turbulent times.

The album takes its name from one of the earlier tracks written for the album. “Something about the title feels both inclusive and also of a larger scene,” explains Other Lives’ creative lynchpin and frontman Jesse Tabish. “The song also embodied the direction we wanted to take.”

The band’s core trio of Jesse Tabish (piano, guitar, lead vocals), Jonathon Mooney (piano, violin, guitar, percussion, trumpet) and Josh Onstott (bass, keys, percussion, guitar, backing vocals) then moved out west to Portland. “Stillwater is a college town, and being surrounded perpetually by 21-year-olds eventually got to me,” Tabish recalls. “And we’d always liked Portland and its politics.”  

In their new north-western base, the trio (plus guests) made their third album, Rituals, released in 2015. Looking back to the 54-minute, 14-track opus that pushed the boundaries of Tabish’s compositional ambitions and perfectionist ways, he says “Working with a computer means you can layer parts forever. I’d forgotten how to pick up a guitar and sing a song, to be more physical and primal with the music. On For Their Love, we’re playing again as a band, with a clear definition of parts instead of 20 layers drenched in reverb.”

Self-producing for the first time since 2006 (Mooney also engineered the album), Other Lives avoided re-working/fixing tracks, choosing instead to record different arrangements of songs, “to try to capture the vibe of something more instant,” says Tabish. “I was adamant that For Their Love would have no tricks, and nothing to hide behind, which I had been doing psychologically as well as musically. I wanted ten songs that held up by themselves."

Part of Tabish’s efforts to emerge from ‘hiding’ was re-engaging with the outside world, “getting real with myself,” as he puts it. To that end, For Their Love’s lyrics “question, observe, lament and hopefully finds the slightest hope in the individual and in ourselves. Characters sometimes venture into spiritual, religious or institutionalised endeavours, though I’ve found that self-worth is more important than any teachings or preaching.”

Out of personal and creative uncertainty and recalibration, Other Lives have re-emerged, a must-have pastoral sensation reborn.