There are places in this world where the veil between Heaven and Earth is permeable, where it’s possible to catch a glimpse of the infinite with both feet still firmly planted on the ground. In Celtic folklore, these spots are known as “thin places,” and though the term is often associated with physical locations—holy sites, natural wonders, works of art—pilgrimages aren’t always required to experience them. Sometimes, if you’re open to something greater than yourself, if you’re willing to surrender to the transcendent, a thin place comes to you. Jason Hawk Harris knows; he’s been living in one for the last five years.

“The process of grieving my mother’s death, of watching my life kind of fall apart around me brought me to this weird sort of nirvana,” he explains. “In those moments, I could feel these different worlds colliding around me, and I knew I wanted to find a way to capture it.”

With his extraordinary new album, Thin Places, Harris has done precisely that. Written from start to finish as one continuous artistic statement, the nine-track collection draws on Harris’ extensive background in classical music to create a genre-defying work of beauty, pain, and catharsis, one that blurs the lines between roots, country, rockabilly, gospel, soul, and chamber folk as it reckons with forces far beyond our control. The songs here are deeply personal, staring down loss, self-destruction, and recovery with unflinching honesty, and the arrangements are similarly bold and cinematic, conjuring up immersive sonic worlds that can feel at once familiar and unsettling, comforting and eerie. Add it all up and you’ve got a bold, bittersweet testament to the complicated legacies we inevitably leave behind, a profoundly moving exploration of the gray areas and liminal spaces—between light and dark, between hope and despair, between life and death—that shape us all.

“I wanted to explore every part of grief with this album, not just the devastating moments,” Harris explains. “When you’re dealing with loss, you’ll have these encounters that can feel confusing or infuriating or even downright funny. There are highs and lows.”

Harris has had more than his fair share of highs and lows already in his career. After moving to Los Angeles at 18 to study classical theory and composition, the Houston native embarked on a stint playing guitar in folky five-piece The Show Ponies before earning early acclaim with his first solo release, 2017’s Formaldehyde, Tobacco and Tulips. The EP helped land Harris a deal with renowned indie label Bloodshot Records for his widely celebrated 2019 full-length debut, Love & The Dark, which garnered praise everywhere from Rolling Stone to Billboard. What should have been a period of triumph and ascendance was instead marked by a cascading series of setbacks and heartbreak: Harris’ mother died, his father declared bankruptcy, his touring van was stolen and totaled, a tornado struck in the middle of his attempt to record a follow-up album, and then his label went under.

“When the pandemic hit, I was in debt from the first record and completely unable to tour, so I just sort of swore off music for about two whole years,” Harris recalls. “I started drinking really heavily and sank into a pretty deep depression.”

The unexpected hiatus forced Harris—who now calls Austin home—to confront the emotions he’d been bottling up around his mother’s early death, and the resulting period of stillness and reflection proved to be a necessary step in processing such a monumental loss.

“I realized that all the constant working and touring I’d been doing had prevented me from actually grieving,” he explains. “Once all that other stuff was stripped away, I had no choice but to face what I’d been running from.”

In that stillness, Harris found a thin place, a mingling of the corporeal and the spiritual that called him back to music. Rather than simply writing a batch of songs and calling it an album, though, he approached the collection as one overarching piece of music that would work its way through multiple sonic and emotional movements.

“I leaned heavily on my classical training when it came to conceptualizing the album,” says Harris, who developed a love for composers like Gregory Crumb and Jennifer Higdon while studying at conservatory. “I’d always been obsessed with the smashing together of musical worlds, of finding ways to combine my passion for contemporary classical music with the Country & Western music of my Texan upbringing, and this felt a chance to take a big step in that direction. I sketched out a thematic and musical structure for the album before I even started writing any of the songs. I figured out what I wanted each track to do, how it would function on the record, where the story would build and where it would die down, how each song would lead into the next and what kind of recurring motifs would tie them all together. And then I just started chopping away at it like a big block of ice until it began to look like what I’d envisioned.”

When word got out that Harris was ready to get back into the studio, in a single day his fans chipped in enough to fund the recordings. A few months later, a freshly re-launched Bloodshot Records came calling, ready to pay Harris what he was owed and re-sign him to the label with a new deal.

“The first time I tried to make this album, I felt a little aimless,” Harris recalls. “But after going through a couple years of what I went through, I knew exactly what I wanted this time around and we were all business in the studio.”

That clarity of vision is obvious on Thin Places, which Harris and producer Andy Freeman designed to be played front to back in a single sitting. Album opener “Jordan and the Nile” sets the stage as something of an overture, building a layer at a time as it brings together soulful a cappella vocals, droning harmonium, and baroque strings in an almost hymn-like solemnity. It’s the first of many expectations Harris sets up only to defy on the album, which shifts gears almost immediately into the tongue-in-cheek “Bring Out The Lilies.”

“I wanted to establish those kinds of contrasts from the start,” Harris explains, “to go from this very serious, contemplative song into something kind of frenetically cynical that’s rooted in all of the uncomfortable interactions you have with people who say stupid things to you when you’re in mourning. I felt comfortable jumping around like that in terms of genre and tone because I’d written the entire arc of the record first, and each of those musical shifts was in service of broader narrative shift.”

The rollicking “Shine A Light” (inspired by a chorus melody written by Harris’s late uncle) offers up slice of barroom honky-tonk as it playfully barrels through a period of stubborn self-destruction; the gospel-tinged “Roll” takes a long hard look in the mirror before opening itself up to the emotional deluge it’s been trying to outrun; and “The Abyss” gets dreamy as it embraces the looming darkness in what proves to be a turning point for the album.

The breakneck “I’m Getting By,” for instance, finds comfort in the judgment-free love of a partner who stands by you in your struggles, while the effervescent “So Damn Good” gives thanks that beauty and romance and sex can all coexist alongside doubt and regret and sadness, and a gorgeous reimagining of Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart” reflects on the memories we hope to leave behind when it’s our turn to go. But it’s album closer “White Berets” that ultimately ties the threads of love and loss together most eloquently, with Harris portraying the afterlife as an ecstatic reunion full of joy and discovery. “I stand up and I jump around / I got me this new body now,” he sings before the song gives way to a freewheeling Cajun accordion solo. “A pair of shades and a white beret / I’m on my way to get you babe / Oh I’m coming soon don’t be afraid / I’m on my way to get you babe.”

“The whole first part of that song is kind of what I hope happens when we die,” Harris explains. “But then it shifts and calls back to ‘Jordan and the Nile’ and ultimately ends with this sharp crescendo of dissonant strings because it was really important for me to acknowledge that this is all an ongoing process. There’s a snap back to reality because we’re all mourning in our own ways—mourning our losses, mourning the hurt others have caused us, mourning the hurt we’ve caused others—and just because the album’s done doesn’t mean that the journey each of us is on is anywhere close to finished.”

In that sense, the album itself is a thin place, a realm where it’s possible to reach out and touch the afterlife while still tethered to the present. “One day the Jordan gonna swallow the Nile,” Harris sings on the record, but until then, we can still swim in both.