Twilark Made “Never Learned the Tide” in Six Days

Never Learned the Tide is twelve songs and a little over 42 minutes. Dominic Billett produced it, and the band cut it at the Bomb Shelter in Nashville in the summer of 2025 with Drew Carroll engineering, then handed it to Glenn Davis to mix and Joe Lambert to master. The players are a dream lineup for a folk record: Erin Rae, Spencer Cullum on pedal steel, Maya de Vitry on banjo and fiddle, plus Paul Defiglia, Hannah Wyatt, and Sparrow Smith.

Recording live over six days means the songs breathe the way a band breathes together. Even the packaging got the handmade treatment. The album art was made on a printing press with real book cloth, and one of the touchstones Canon Pence names is the Mashed Potato Records compilations. This is a record made by someone who loves records.

Canon Pence grew up in the rural foothills of Western North Carolina and now writes from Raleigh. His previous album, The Taming Ties Create, was a Bandcamp New and Notable pick, and this one feels like the confident next step.

He has a gift for not taking himself too seriously, which makes the sad songs hit harder. He told Atwood Magazine that “Tired to Sleep” was “written as a kind of throwaway hangover song and almost forgotten.” It ended up as one of the album’s centerpieces. And on “All Things Will Fade,” he finds the bright side of an ending: “I like the cheery optimism of saying everything ends.”

Start with “Tired to Sleep,” the song that almost did not make it, then let “All Things Will Fade” do its gentle work. Six days in one room, and it sounds like they caught something that will last a lot longer.