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Amid the weird and whimsical anecdotes in Moby-Dick comes this thoughtful gem: “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.” The narrator goes on to ponder the nature of the human soul, finally concluding that his own body is “but the lees of my better being”—exactly the fanciful leap of thought that makes Herman Melville’s great book of the sea one of the most beguiling mysteries in literature.
Small wonder Alec Duckart, the Portland singer-songwriter who makes sweeping and incorporeal-sounding folk music as Searows, chose this passage as the inspiration for the title of his new album, Death in the Business of Whaling; even the act of whaling, with its connotations of rugged living and antiquated strangeness, feels like a fit for the windswept music on the 25-year-old’s second full-length release.
“I love writing about the ocean and animals,” Duckart says. “I feel like I’m so influenced by growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and the things that I find beautiful are very inspired by that.”
Duckart was born in Kentucky but moved to Portland with his family at a young age. The music of his childhood was indie folk by the likes of the Decemberists, Iron & Wine and Sufjan Stevens, who enjoyed the peak of their popularity while he was still in grade school. It’s not hard to see echoes of those artists in the gentle, spider-webbed soundscapes on Whaling.
“I feel like I’ve always gravitated toward sad music,” Duckart says. “Everything that I write is in some way sad or angsty.”
This may be one reason why Duckart’s music resonated with so many people during the pandemic. After posting material on SoundCloud to limited success, Duckart first found traction in 2020 in 2021 on TikTok posting covers of songs by indie-rock icon Phoebe Bridgers, to whose voice Duckart’s has frequently been compared by fans and critics.
“Once TikTok started to become what it is now in 2020, everyone was on the internet all the time,” Duckart says. “That was the first time that I ever reached anyone other than my friends and family.”
Searows’ first original song to gain major traction was “House Song,” a spooky, finger-picked sketch about a house that wears the memories of its occupants’ lives in its walls and windows. Though the song’s ambiguous lyrics suggest this is not a portrait of a happy home, it soon started showing up in Instagram reels, often ones with a nostalgic tone.
“It was so different from everything that I had understood about how the internet worked,” Duckart says. “The TikTok algorithm that pushed everything to everyone was something I had never experienced on the internet before.”
Following the success of “House Song” and Searows’ self-released debut, Guard Dog, in 2022, major artists started paying attention to Duckart’s music. In April 2023, the goth-Americana star Ethel Cain discovered Duckart through a mutual friend and invited him to open for a show in Southern California, where the two nade a duet of Cain’s song “Hard Times.” Not long afterward, English singer-songwriter Matt Maltese signed Searows as the inaugural artist on his Last Recordings on Earth label, which will release Death in the Business of Whaling on Friday.
With new access to label resources, Duckart is expanding his style far beyond the GarageBand sketches on which he first made his name. For Whaling, Duckart decamped to Washington state to work with producer Trevor Spencer, who’s worked with indie luminaries like dream-pop duo Beach House and rakish singer-songwriter Father John Misty.
“The perfectionistic tendencies that I have would make it miserable at times to work by myself,” Duckart says. “I could just sit and record the same vocal part for hours if I wanted to. Not being able to fixate on these random details that no one else would care about is overall very beneficial.”
The increased production fidelity on Whaling contrasts with Duckart’s lyrics, which have grown more stream of consciousness in the years since the concise images of “House Song” first captured the public’s attention. Some fans may miss these sharply drawn specificities, but other listeners may find the ambiguities leave more room for them to project their own feelings onto the music.
“I definitely had this realization that you are in some way giving up a song for other people to interpret however they want,” Duckart says. “But it’s freeing that I can write something that is about my own personal life and someone will imagine it’s about something that I’ve never experienced. It’s comforting to know that it’s not really about me, even if it is.”
SEE IT: Searows in-store performance and signing at Music Millennium, 3158 E Burnside St., musicmillennium.com. 6 pm Wednesday, Jan 28. Preorder Death in the Business of Whaling at the website ($27.98) to guarantee admission. All ages.
