Daughter of Swords (aka Mountain Man's Alexandra Sauser-Monnig) follows up her 2019 Nonesuch debut, Dawnbreaker, with a new digital single entitled “Prairie Winter Wasteland,” released February 5, 2020. The Jeff Tweedy–produced track, recorded at his Chicago studio The Loft, is about Sauser-Monnig’s hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, and her family roots there. Tweedy, who invited Daughter of Swords on tour with Wilco last year, joins her on a variety of instruments on the single, while his son Spencer is featured on drums, with Nick Macri on bass.

The song “is a reflection on the way our emotional experiences of place are shaped in powerful and mystical ways by the people we’ve know there,” says Sauser-Monnig. “The way a certain quality of sunlight, or the call of a particular bird can conjure such specific associations, and can break your heart or lift you up. In the midst of sweltering North Carolina summer, I took a mental journey through the stark, abstract beauty of Minnesotan winter, and wrote this song that feels very much about the ways my grandmother who passed away several years ago is still present for me in the frozen blue sky and the dark bare branches of oaks and the snow blowing across frozen lakes of the upper Midwest.”

On recording at The Loft, she notes: “The breadth of instruments and knowledge and kindness that live there made it a super inspiring place to create something new, and it started with the main loop. We made it out of a hammer dulcimer, a guitarette and a magical ancient instrument called a celestaphone. Working with those unfamiliar sonic textures made recording the song feel as much like painting as it did music making, and also maybe a little bit like breaking into frozen crystal ice caverns and pushing through dense conifer forests into a sudden quiet clearings.”