Marianas Trench routinely up their game substantially with each successive album, but their sixth full-length release, Haven, is more epic and far-reaching, musically and thematically, than anything they’ve done before.
On Haven, Josh Ramsay and the band take on ‘The Hero’s Journey’ – a mainstay for generations in describing the commonalities between virtually every quest narrative – as laid out in a series of plot points in Joseph Campbell’s, ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces.’ That sets the hook for the band’s most ambitious, yet universally relatable, record yet – complete with huge orchestral and vocal arrangements, and, of course, crushingly big rock and roll elements aplenty.
“Pulling from The Hero’s Journey framework, I’m talking about a lot of big life themes, with the idea of a haven in the storm as a destination,” Ramsay says, “and making Haven was like passing through a giant storm, so there’s a lot of elemental imagery.”
Each of the thirteen songs represents a plot point, taking listeners out of their ordinary world on the album opener, ‘A Normal Life,’ tossing them ‘Into The Storm’ and, ultimately, on the album’s grand finale and title track, ‘Haven’ (arguably the most challenging track Ramsay’s ever written), full circle – only wiser, more certain, and certainly irrevocably changed.
“I didn’t realize how much I’d bitten off until I was three-quarters into this,” he continues. At one point, I was like, ‘You know, this ended up being a lot more difficult than I bargained for,’ and my wife said, ‘Yeah. Because you’ve picked every story.’ That never really occurred to me in the moment.”
Granted, Ramsay had help: from long-time collaborator and mixer Dave “Rave” Ogilvie and the band – bassist Mike Ayley, guitarist Matt Webb, and drummer Ian Casselman – all who offered much-needed support as sounding boards along the way.
It’s tempting to describe a record that seems to touch on so many musical styles, genres, and eras, intentional or not, as the ‘love child of’ various artists. On Haven, however, the strands of musical DNA Marianas Trench weaves together are too numerous to pin down. Whether a track is enormous in scope, like ‘Worlds Collide,’ or stripped down to bare bones as on standout, ‘Nights Like These,’ at the core, what makes Haven’s sonic explorations so singularly compelling – beyond Ramsay’s intensely hooky melodies and lyrics, and the band’s collective ability to capture lightning in a bottle so routinely on every record – is that the result sounds unlike anything else but Marianas Trench.
As massive as Haven is conceptually and sonically, Marianas Trench never lose the plot; presenting a sprawling set of songs that rely as much on the sound, power, and versatility of the band as a take-no-prisoners, four-piece rock outfit as on their ethic of pushing the envelope as hard as they can with each new offering.
Like all their previous records, Haven finds Ramsay intentionally expanding his range as a songwriter, producer, and arranger, incorporating more synthesizer and orchestral elements, and challenging his bandmates as players and vocalists in their own right as never before.
“Haven is way more cinematic than anything we’ve done,” Ayley says, “which is saying a lot because our music’s always been cinematic. But Josh was really stretching his capabilities, and finding out where ours end. If this was our first record none of us would make the cut,” he adds, laughing.
Deeply layered and heavily orchestrated, Haven is grand and powerful from stem to stern but leaves plenty of room for anyone who’s felt there was more to life, or that they were meant for something different, to find their personal journeys reflected. And the band is no exception, Ayley says: “When I’m listening or playing the music, I personalize the songs and get a pretty large emotional curve in the experience myself.”
Listeners will, too, Webb adds: “Even if they have no idea what the song was written about, they, and we, will associate it with certain feelings and times in their life.”
By basing Haven on ‘every story ever,’ Ramsay set a lofty goal. “Normally, I’ll produce a song – right to the finish line – with no vocals. Then, hopefully, the vibe cues me to what it’s about. This was the opposite. I knew the lyrics for each song had to evoke a plot point and where each song was going to fall in the album order. Also, because I don’t invent, I always sing about autobiographical stuff, I had to access that by finding those things, those meanings in my life.”
Nowhere was that more challenging than on the Haven’s second track, ‘Lightning and Thunder.’ “I had to go back to the drawing board a lot for that; on the lyrics, melody, chords, the song itself. That’s the second plot point, ‘the call to adventure.’ In the past year, my wife and I were expecting, and knowing a kid’s coming was a big call to adventure for me. But it also brought up the fact that both my parents died in 2020.”
While those are opposite ends of the spectrum of experience, Ramsay found a way of celebrating new life and reconciling loss by recognizing the bonds that tie us all to our loved ones with the lyric: “Sometimes I feel my mother and father in the room, It’s like their hands are on my shoulders, So I think they feel us, too.’ But, Ramsay adds: “aside from what it means to me, I’m hoping it will evoke, for someone else, the feeling like you’re getting called up for something big.
“When I first started talking about this, the initial question people asked was, ‘is this going to be a specific story with a protagonist and characters with specific names? Is it as literal as that?'”
It isn’t.
By design, Haven is as much Ramsay’s story and Marianas Trench’s collective story, as it is the story that plays out in the minds and hearts of every listener. “I don’t usually like to talk specifically about what songs mean to me,” Ramsay sums up. “I think the important thing is what they mean to somebody else when they listen to them. So I do hope that after listening to Haven, hopefully, people will feel like this could be the soundtrack to their own hero’s journey
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