Ghost Light at Revolution Hall 12/10 as part of Northwest Tour

“It’s not fun realizing that you fucked up. It’s not fun realizing that you’ve been hurt. It’s not fun realizing that you’re vulnerable. But it’s all in this album. From the macro view of humanity to the zoomed-in micro view of specific events in the band’s personal lives, and everywhere in between.”

Ghost Light recently shared their sophomore studio album The Healing via Royal Potato Family. The new album sees the group at the top of their musical game. The record was co-produced by Hamilton and the band recorded everything live and without multiple takes. “Recording this album was not an easy, straight forward process,” says Mullen. “It was a lesson in patience to figure out the right feel of a song, which can always change take to take. Which parts needed to breathe more and which needed to push with urgency. Making an album this way helped us understand the true inner workings of each song and how we can carry that to a live performance. If someone was pushing or pulling the song then the whole band needed to really be listening to react to that. I think it made us all better musicians in the long run to record the songs like this. Accepting that an entire take may not be perfect but the essence of the song with everyone felt just right was important.

Topically, the record dives deep into the emotional and psychological adversities that they had to overcome as individuals as well as a band.

“The path to health and healing is often not the path of least resistance but the path of perseverance and doing the work,” says Hamilton. “The Covid times allowed me to have an emotional reckoning with myself. The bouts of depression. The crippling anxiety. Waking up every day and choosing the difficult realizations and the hard truths.”

Adds Mullen, “The Healing was something I had been searching for over the last 4 years, and still lose and find again every day. Can you ever fully heal from traumas you’ve experienced or do they just simply live inside of you and you learn to dance around them? Writing my traumas into songs and figuring out a way to look at them with shifting perspectives, face them in the mirror and see how they changed me is not easy. I have a hard time letting go and really releasing but I found a lot of freedom, and new parts of my soul, in writing these songs.”

Ghost Light was born out of Hamilton’s last band, American Babies. “Raina had joined during the making of the last album and we had met Holly during that tour, having her sit in on a few shows,” remembers Hamilton, “ultimately I needed a change and started putting together a new band in the spring of 2017.

“By late summer of 2017 I had the band, and full team assembled but one thing was missing. There was no music, yet.”

In the fall of 2017 Hamilton and Mullen wrote an album’s worth of new material with the aid of “a shit load of LSD.” We had 14 songs ready to introduce to our new band. The first time the five of us all played together was in December 2017 at Hamilton’s studio in Philadelphia. The chemistry was immediate and the rest is history.

The Healing follows Ghost Light’s debut album Best Kept Secrets (2019), followed by defining festival sets at Peach Music Fest in 2018 and 19 and Northwest String Summit in 2019. In 2020 Ghost Light played to a packed house at Denver’s legendary Ogden Theater before being forced to cancel touring plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ghost Light will tour extensively this coming fall in support of the new music, and fans should expect a lot more touring from the band in 2023.