Humbird

Cosmic Imagery

Stars wheel overhead, bursting and dying and forming. Celestial bodies, anchored by ancient orbits, careen through space. Here on Earth, bodies need tending, hearts need mending. Sometimes it seems that the long night will never end. But stars and planets remind us: change is the only constant.

Album Overview

Humbirds fourth full-length album, Morning When It Comes, is a promise made in the midst of a long night. With glittering hooks, big-hearted grooves, and clear-voiced melodies that cut straight to the truth, Humbird offers twelve new secular hymns that draw inspiration from the cosmos above to comfort us in our humanity down below.

Lead Songwriter Siri Undlin

For lead songwriter Siri Undlin (she/her), this album first took shape as a set of poetic compasses for navigating mental and physical illness. I found certain melodies and rhymes to be like North Stars, she notes, the songwriting process functioning as a balm and a map for reckoning with internal worlds of pain and discomfort. This process isn't new for Undlin: whether singing as a kid in school stairwells, around the kitchen table with family, conducting extensive folklore and musical research worldwide as a Watson Fellow, or touring through the US and EU/UK on the heels of her 2024 album Right On, music has always been her tool for navigating the world.

Creative Reflections

I wrote these songs when I was really sick, and it could've very easily been a really depressing album, she says. But in the studio, it was important to all of us to find the ways these songs could harness mischief and exuberance not to downplay the density of the emotions, but to represent the complexity and contradictions that occur on any given day of our lives.

Recording and Community

Recording Morning When It Comes with trusted collaborators in Eau Claire, Wisconsin transformed these twelve self-soothing songs into a bigger, more universal conversation about stability, surrender, and the power of being in community.