Roots rock band Dispatch announced Break Our Fall, a new album set for May 28 release on Bomber Recordings/AWAL Recordings. The album will compile last year’s Phase 1 & Phase 2 EPs with ten new tracks. One of the new tracks, “Born On Earth,” was released as a single along with the announcement.

“Oh, do you know/There’s a place you can go,” drummer Brad Corrigan and guitarist Chadwick Stokes sing in harmony to open the song. Starting out with sparse guitar chords, it builds into a full band climax with piano, bass and light percussion joining in with waltz timing. It’s an optimistic song about living each day like you’ve been born again that encourages enjoying nature.  “Everybody knows, we all died yesterday/And the day after that we were born/Born to a dark heaven on Earth/Plagued by man’s greed and sorrow/Sorrow and hurt/Born also to the beauty of tomorrow/Leading us back to the dirt.”

Accompanying the track is a drone-captured music video showing the band out on some scenic cliffs above a group of surfers. Dispatch says of the footage that it was, “Filmed around the underground missile silo that was and is location 12, and taken during our daily walks to quiet the ringing in our ears…Our friend Matt Catalano manned the drone and was edited together by Mike Gill.”

Break Our Fall will be their eighth studio album since they formed as a trio with Pete Francis in 1995. This record is a project from Corrigan and Stokes alone, the press release implies. Francis reportedly stopped touring with the band in 2017 to focus on treating his depression. 

The album is as much about human nature itself as it is about Corrigan and Stokes’ personal life journeys, according to the press release. It’s about “charting a course from denial and resistance to growth and acceptance through deep introspection and empathetic character studies.” Corrigan and Stokes have experienced a lot of change lately, listing life events such as marriage, birth, death, departure, the recent political climate, “long-overdue reckonings on racial justice/gender equality” and the global pandemic as inspiration for Break Our Fall.

Break Our Fall Tracklist:

1. May We All
2. All This Time
3. One By One
4. As Old As I
5. The Legend of Connie Hawkins
6. Silent Type
7. Break Our Fall
8. Second Class Soldier
9. Promise Land
10. Born on Earth
11. Greta
12. Elevator Operator
13. Stoned Enough To Gather In The Night
14. The Poet Nurse and The Identical Queen
15. Pour Into You
16. Connie Hawkins Coda (CD/vinyl only)