A road stretching into heat. A house sold on the promise of permanence, already marked for ruin. A brother who disappears, another who changes his name. Someone watching the world burn from a tower in the hills. Someone else locked behind bars, counting the hours. Points of Origin, Will Stratton’s eighth album and third for Bella Union, is an American novel in disguise, circling through time, revisiting lives at their turning points. It’s an album of trajectories—who people become, where they end up, what the fire leaves behind.
Stratton has long been a quiet master of folk storytelling, his intricate guitar work drawing comparisons to Nick Drake and Bert Jansch. But here, he moves beyond all that, weaving something wider, more panoramic. Points of Origin has the fatalistic sweep of Illinois, the dust and drift of Jason Molina, the novelistic sprawl of Divers. Its characters flicker through the haze, their lives shifting like heatwaves over asphalt while the land beneath them burns, vanishes, and reclaims itself.
The album begins with two brothers, each taking a different road, never to meet again. One hauls engines near the Cascades, trying to hold back the flames (‘I Found You’). The other, after years in prison, moves from a cell to the fire lines, learning how to “sever fuel from flame” in the same hills where he once hid (‘Jesusita’). Each song bears the weight of its subject—one slow and searching, the other quiet with gratitude and regret.
Time rewinds to the late ’60s on ‘Temple Bar’, a dive where radicals and drifters crossed paths. Charlie, the pool shark, vanished north. Roger, the student revolutionary, turned up as a forester. Lena, once a painter, abandoned art for real estate in Monterey, swapping canvases for beachfront deals. John Leonard, the one who never left, will later be found in ‘Centinela’, staring at his reflection in a grocery store window, waiting to recognise himself. The music shifts with them—fiddle brushing against pedal steel, saxophone sidling up beside electric guitar. The arrangements feel worn-in, familiar, but never settled. Years later, Temple Bar suffers the same fate as its patrons. It burns.
Stratton lets the land speak on ‘Red Crossed Star’:
“Grass and water and open sky
Fading memories of genocide
Distant mountains receding sand
Mass conversion and stolen land.”
He distills centuries into a single refrain—prehistoric hunters, the missionaries with their wine, the suburban dreamers in their glass houses. The land watches as names and flags change, as people pass through, as fire reshapes the map again and again.
By now, Points of Origin feels like a warning. ‘Bardo or Heaven?’ sifts through self-delusion as smoke settles over the valley, the highways hardening into bypasses, the future looking more and more like the past. “The smoke reaching over from a week ago / Like a postcard sent by a devil passing through Modesto.” In ‘Higher and Drier’, Lena, the painter-turned-realtor, sells homes she knows won’t survive fire season. She gestures to the view over Clear Lake, all fire zone now, but the deals are still made. No one asks about the drought, the smoke damage, or the fact that insurance has all but disappeared. The steel guitar slips through like an omen, as another piece of Lena’s soul is foreclosed.
‘Higher and Drier’ follows Lena, once a painter, now a realtor selling homes she knows won’t last. She walks clients through Lake County, pointing out views of Clear Lake. It’s all fire zone now, but the deals are still made. A house is purchased, the papers signed. No one asks about the drought, or the smoke damage, or the fact that insurance has all but disappeared. The steel guitar slips through the track like an omen, as another tiny piece of Lena soul is foreclosed.
In ‘Centinela’, John Leonard is behind bars, staring at the desert, an inmate near the Mexican border. Once, he was something else. Maybe a drifter, maybe worse. Now he waits, counting out days, whispering to the fire as if it still belongs to him.
“Centinela, all the points of origin are moving up high
The desert’s getting bigger, crowding out the tinder of my mind.”
And then there’s ‘Slab City’, the last stop. A retired public defender takes in a former prisoner, someone whose past is redacted in sealed court documents, whose father was fed LSD in government trials, discarded when he was no longer useful. The desert hums with stories like his. Stratton lets the song settle into the dust, half-buried. No one here is looking for redemption.
Points of Origin is an album in motion, its roads stretching outward, indifferent to where they lead. Voices rise, ready to confess, only to fade before the words fully form. And yet, for all their impermanence, these songs are anything but fleeting. Stratton’s vision is razor-sharp, his compositions exacting, his lyrics quiet but unshakable. The melodies shift, dissolve, reappear—never static, never lost. Even as the flames consume and the past erodes, Points of Origin lingers, its characters hanging in the air like smoke, their footprints etched in ash. A haunting, deeply human testament to lives passing through, and the stories that refuse to be erased.
