It was well received (the Independent praised its “luminosity” and “spirit of open possibility”). Instead, over the space of a few months, they assembled Antiphon from scratch. Eighteen months later, with Jesse still deep in the trenches of grief, his father appeared in a dream and expressed to him the hope that Midlake re-emerged from the hiatus they’d been on since 2014.īlind-sided by the departure, his now ex-bandmates scrapped the songs they’d sketched out with Smith. “He used to talk about how he and his friend were boxed in because there were so many people.”Ĭhandler’s father, who was 65, died in October 2018 when a Grand Cherokee jeep slammed into him in a Walmart car park near Bethel, the upstate New York town that had hosted Woodstock, and to where he had returned to work, live and raise his family. “He must have gotten pretty close to the stage, because he’s in quite a few of the shots in the film ,” says Chandler, from Midlake’s base in Denton, Texas, as the vintage-rock six-piece prepare to release a long-awaited fifth album, For The Sake of Bethel Woods. He wanted to cry, but found himself smiling, too. How he watched the hippy dream catalyse over the course of an evening of epoch-defining rock ’n’ roll.
As he walked the springing turf, he thought about his father, imagining how 16-year-old Dave Chandler must have felt as he arrived at the music festival in August 1969.
The morning after his father’s funeral in upstate New York, Midlake keyboardist Jesse Chandler rose early and made a “pilgrimage” to the great, wind-swept pasture that decades earlier had hosted Woodstock. That was something that was very palpable to the band and, obviously, to people around the world' (Barbara FG) Midlake: ‘There was a big, overarching theme of loss and of finding purpose or creating purpose.
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