Eli Moore presents a fascinating new solo album, The Power Line (Anything Bagel). Recorded at Unknown Recording Studio in Anacortes (with its owner and longtime collaborator, Nicholas Wilbur), it is shaped by the production instincts he’s developed over the past 20 years with his band LAKE. The Power Line finds Eli inviting friends from a lifetime in music to help realize a simple vision: songs that work on their own in solo performance, but open up and bloom on record.
Written and collected gradually over several years, these folky, acoustically rooted songs feel especially personal. The title track, “The Power Line,” rides on ’90s jamband–style grooves and explores Eli’s shadow self, yet the album's overall sound is more like Red House Painters or Americana indie-rock. “Salt to Taste” plays like a restless Western landscape painting—thick brushstrokes, turbulent skies, and searching, questioning old systems while finding grounding in something more elemental. “Pays to Love” is a hook-y wake-up call about waiting for meaning or transformation, set to a danceable, ’70s Mick Fleetwood–era disco pulse. Another standout track, straight from the embers of the primordial fire, is the English folk ballad “Geordie,” a heartbreaking story of compassion overruled by cold authority and social hierarchy.
Featured collaborators include Mark Buzard (The Format), Paul Benson (Ever Ending Kicks / New Issue), Steve Moore (Earth, Sufjan Stevens), Jenn Grant, and, of course, Eli’s wife and LAKE bandmate, Ashley Eriksson.
The Power Line is being released by the steadily growing, enthusiastically run Butte, Montana–based label Anything Bagel—a place Eli is genuinely happy to call home.