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Spartan Records and Mountain Time – the solo project of singer-songwriter Chris Simpson of Mineral and The Gloria Record – are excited to present “Empty Graves,” the second track to be lifted from the Friday, June 26 release of his new album titled 'Music For Looking Animals'. Written in 2005-2006, “Empty Graves” paints a picture of a soul trying to find its place in the world and was born out of a fruitful songwriting session Simpson contributed to at the time. Never feeling that the song was complete, the gentle & charming “Empty Graves” had many lives and incarnations until Simpson began working with producer/collaborator Doug Walseth on this new album and it reached its final form.

“I remember getting the first mix back from Doug and feeling like it was just much too dry and dull,” Simpson said. “I told him I wanted it to sound like it was being played back from a radio on the moon. The next day he sent me the final mix. Sometimes it’s just the briefest visceral description or vision that sets the course.”

In the aftermath of the dissolution of his adored bands, Simpson took a step back from making music for the first time since his mid-teens. And it was during this period where an affinity for the music of the Sixties and Seventies such as Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Harry Nilsson, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and many more, along with the freedom and expression of jazz and artists who radically followed their own vision, took root. With additional inspiration drawn from the arenas of psychology and eastern philosophy, the beauty of the natural world, Simpson’s children and wife, old Time Life books, and the self-stated immenseness of the universe, Mountain Time has become almost more of a state-of-mind than a moniker.