Shearwater takes cues from nature

Shearwater with Damien Jurado and Lohio

Saturday at 8 p.m.

Thunderbird Cafe

Tickets: $15 in… Shearwater with Damien Jurado and Lohio

Saturday at 8 p.m.

Thunderbird Cafe

Tickets: $15 in advance, $17 at the door

21+

www.thunderbirdcafe.net

Because Jonathan Meiburg, frontman of indie band Shearwater, plays in cities almost every night, he savors every moment in nature he can get.

“These moments take you outside of where you are,” Meiburg said. “I try to take them when I can find them.”

Meiburg has a long-standing affinity with the outdoors: He’s an avid bird watcher with a master’s degree in geography. Even the band’s name is taken from a long-winged sea bird and its most recent album, The Golden Archipelago, is largely inspired by Meiburg’s travels to remote corners of the world, including the Falkland Islands, Madagascar, the Galapagos Islands and the Bikini Atoll.

In 1997 Meiburg received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the daily life of human communities untouched by 20th-century technology.

“The more I look at humans and animals, the more alike they seem,” he said. “I’m fascinated by places that are still preserved as the way things were. I had no idea the world was like that, and it changed the way I looked at things from then on.”

Although these travels happened more than 10 years ago, Meiburg has finally begun to express his experiences musically.

“Sometimes things that happened to you a long time ago take time to process,” he said. “I spent time on these islands and thought it was a fruitful place to go looking for an album.”

A 50-page dossier of photographs, immigration records and journal entries Meiburg collected on his travels is included with the first 10,000 copies of The Golden Archipelago.

“I included them because no one was going to see them except for me,” he said. “It gives the listener suggestions of what to think about while listening … It’s like a file folder you find in a professor’s office, and you have to make sense of it somehow.

The Golden Archipelago was recorded in only one week and has received mainly positive reviews from critics and fans alike.

“We wanted to make a record without regard of what people thought and just have the joy of doing something on the spot,” Meiburg said. “We did it just for the love of it.”

Meiburg is not alone in this sentiment. Bassist Kimberly Burke — who, prior to the recording, lived in Boston though the rest of the band lived in Austin — spent time listening to recordings Meiburg sent her and worked on the bass lines in her living room. Although lyrically the group is mostly under Meiburg’s creative direction, Burke felt she was still contributing musically despite the distance.

“It’s some of my best work as a bass player,” Burke said. “I liked helping to craft the direction and energy of bringing the songs together.”

As a female bassist in a music scene largely dominated by men, Burke claims she never feels out of place within her own group but is quick to notice when female musicians are on stage.

“A lot of time when I’m on tour with seven dudes and we see a band with a chick, I’m the first to point it out. I’m more aesthetically interested in the band like that because they’re not homogenous,” she said. “Maybe people in the rock scene aren’t thinking about it [the lack of women in music], but they should be.”

The band’s tour is short — lasting only through November — but it has been playing in a different city almost nightly for each show. After a stop in Washington, D.C., the tour van was broken into and many of the group’s personal items were stolen.

“Fortunately, they didn’t lift the gear or steal the van,” Meiburg said. “Otherwise, we would have had to cancel the tour.”