"The folk music and big trees that surrounded my childhood were hugely impactful," says songwriter and farmer Nathaniel Talbot of his upbringing just a few hundred miles south of his farm in the foothills just southeast of Portland, Oregon. "I spent most of my free time running around the forest and making up adventures with the neighbor kids," he says. "The natural setting certainly imprinted on my sense of self and how I make music." Raised on the music of Paul Simon and Eric Clapton, Talbot began playing music at a young age, learning piano at seven and turning to guitar around thirteen, later steeping himself in the sounds of local artists like Soundgarden, Elliot Smith, and Kelly Joe Phelps. Produced by Talbot along with Rob Stroup, Swamp Rose & Honeysuckle Vine marks a big step forward in Talbot's evolution as a lyricist and a storyteller. "If you listen to my previous albums, there's a lot of songs of logging, botany, and even soil erosion, photosynthesis and the deep beauty of hiking at night,” says Talbot. But upon becoming a farmer, he began to dig deep into our most human trait – storytelling. "There was all of a sudden all this raw, untapped material to write about. Stuff that people used to sing about – stories about farmers wrestling the landscape, loving it, abusing it, old tractors getting stuck in the wetland, kids leaving the farm, soil blowing away in the wind, long hard days of work and the amazing sense of reward and connection with the land.”