Gregory Alan Isakov laughs when asked how his quiet, pastoral music somehow ended up closing The Haunting of Hill House. “I hadn’t even seen it,” he admits. “I’m unplugged sometimes. My manager called and told me about it, and I was like, ‘Wait, what show is that again?’”
The song, “If I Go, I’m Goin,” plays over the final scene of the Netflix series, wrapping the ghosts and grief in something tender and human. It’s a fitting match for an artist who spends his nights chasing beauty in darkness.
“Evening Machines,” his fifth album and first in five years, was written mostly after a literal flood — the kind that upends your life and forces you to start over. “We had a big flood in Boulder,” he says. “It kind of set me traveling for a while, crashing with friends, before I went full-time farming. Looking back, that flood might’ve been the best thing that happened to me.”
The pause between records wasn’t a creative drought. Isakov was still writing — in fields, in barns, in the blue glow of studio gear left on overnight. “I’d finish a long day of farming, then go play with my ‘evening machines,’” he says, explaining the album title. “We’d keep the gear on all the time, so there was this orange glow in the corn at night. That light kind of became a thing.”
He’s not exaggerating about the farming. When he’s not touring, Isakov tends an actual working farm in Colorado, growing heirloom corn, mint lemon basil, and “like, twelve kinds of lettuce.” Between restaurant orders and seed contracts, he jokes that it’s “a little more full-time than I meant it to be.” But the connection between soil and song is obvious in his writing — the patience, the cycles, the humility of letting things take their time. “You’re forced to simplify,” he says. “You figure out what’s really important.”
That sense of perspective extends to the album’s themes, especially on the song “Birth,” which began as a 20-minute burst before being cut down to its current form. “We didn’t realize what we were writing,” he says. “It turned into this immigration song — Statue of Liberty as one character, this angel as another, kind of arriving here like an immigrant.”
Isakov and his brother immigrated from South Africa as kids. “We grew up with a bunch of other immigrant families in our building,” he says. “So yeah, when you see what’s happening in the news, it hits hard. You realize the whole world’s going through it — people being told they don’t belong because of imaginary lines.” He pauses. “I grew up in apartheid. I know what that’s like. We think we’re past it, but we’re not. It’s scary.”
Still, his songs rarely sermonize. “I don’t sit down to write about a topic,” he says. “It’s more like, I start from nothing and hope it leads somewhere real. I just want the song to feel universal — like anyone can find themselves in it.”
Universality is exactly what makes Evening Machines glow. “Caves,” one of the record’s standouts, is both cosmic and communal — a dozen voices singing every word together in a single room. “We recorded that one in a bar,” he says. “Everyone singing into a couple mics, drums crushed through this old compressor called a Double Lock. I geeked out because the mixer in Portland had the actual piece of gear I’d modeled mine after. I’d never even seen one in real life.”
He laughs when talking about his meticulous recording habits. “I had like thirty-five songs. My house is covered in notebooks,” he says. “Some just didn’t fit. Certain songs want to live together. Others don’t.” Which means, yes, there’s another album partially finished somewhere on his farm — likely next to the irrigation plans and seed orders. “It’s not done,” he says, “but it’s pretty fleshed out. So maybe it won’t be another five years.”
Still, he’s fine with the long gaps. “People say you gotta keep putting stuff out or they’ll forget you,” he says. “But Gillian Welch takes five years between records. That always seemed brave to me. I’d rather make something that lasts.”
For an artist who literally grows things for a living, that patience feels right. The crops come when they come. The songs do, too. Both demand quiet work and a little faith in what the night might reveal.
“I don’t know,” he says finally, with the same calm that runs through his music. “Maybe that’s why I like recording at night. Everything slows down. You can hear the stars doing their talking.”
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