The Pine Hearts Travel to Antarctica and Beyond for ‘Lost Love Songs’

Just blinding white and pale blue — a frozen desert stretching out for miles and miles in all directions. The sheer scale of it is mind boggling, says Joey Capoccia, band leader and songwriter of the Americana roots trio, The Pine Hearts. He’s talking about Antarctica, the icy continent that to him, is both an empty wasteland and beautiful oasis of the soul, separate from the modern world yet full of inspiration.

In 2020, Antarctica became the setting for a freewheeling new track called “Wouldn’t You Know” (streaming below), and its creation helps frame The Pine Hearts’ potent mix of folk, bluegrass, old-time country and punk. With Capoccia working as a carpenter for the National Science Foundation, he found a quiet place in South Pole greenhouse and began thinking about home — or rather, how he was not so sure he missed it. Soon enough, a standout track from the band’s new album was born.

With plucky vocals — forever young and full of curiosity — plus acoustic guitar, upright bass, fiddle and mandolin, the bouncy track helps explore the way travel and new experience drive Capoccia’s songwriting.

“It’s not like you’re going out at night — there’s no where to go,” Capoccia says of crafting tunes at the bottom of the world. “Let alone this wild experience of seeing things you’ve never seen before. Just being in Antartica is inspiring.”

You can hear that inspiration in “Wouldn’t You Know.” With lyrics that celebrate the untethered life of a traveling musician — “Drinking champagne out of mason jars” — the track is part of the Olympia, Washington-based band’s new album Lost Love Songs (out today, February 18), and Capoccia spoke with Sounds Like Nashville about where the project will transport its listeners.

Speaking over the phone, Capoccia was actually in another far flung corner of the world — this time the Hawaiian island of Kauai — and said that for him, pursuits of travel and songwriting are deeply intertwined.

“It’s kind of like the carrot on the end of the stick metaphor,” he says with an easy laugh. “It’s satisfying to write a song, but at the same time it makes me want to write more songs! I don’t ever really want more than that.”

Over the years, that viscous creative circle has led Capoccia and the band all over the U.S. and abroad, and everywhere they go, he seems to pick up new inspiration. Sometimes it’s the surroundings themselves, and on Lost Love Songs, The Pine Hearts’ sound often has the crisp and clean feel of mountain air, or the slow-rolling tempo of Pacific-ocean waves crashing against rock. But often, it’s something else.

“Seeing new places [is inspiring], but really it’s meeting new people,” Capoccia explains. “I’m at the mission on Kauai right now and you get to meet a whole new group of musicians. What I’ve noticed is that everyone plays a little differently in different parts of the world, so it’s so cool to hang out with those people and add a little color – this sounds so cheesy – but add a little color to the landscape of your life. [laughs]”

For “Wouldn’t You Know,” those new people were scientists studying the cosmos in one of the darkest places on Earth. It was early 2020 and Joey’s fifth trip to the icy land, and even though he knew nothing about space, the people he met fired his curiosity.

“There’s nothing but blue sky and white snow as far as you can see, for hundreds of miles. You look out the window and it almost feels like youre in the middle of the ocean,” he says. “The cool thing is you might be a carpenter or an electrician, and not a Nobel-Prize winning scientist, but everyone hangs out together and eats together, and you wind up learning a lot. Scientists are usually eager to show you what they’re working on, you can go by after dinner and they’ll show you their whole project.”

His song itself seems to celebrate that feeling of discovery, while also wrestling with the natural desire to put down roots. Sitting in the greenhouse, Capoccia just opened his heart to the question, “Why am I here, so far from home?”

“Looking back now, the first lyric is ‘Wouldn’t you know, I’m missing my hometown,’ and it’s like ‘Well yeah, here I am thousands of miles away from home, and of course I miss it,” he explains. “But then the next line is ‘But I probably would have drown,’ and it’s like ‘Do I want to stay put in one place? Or keep doing this travel thing?’ You miss home, but you probably would have drowned if you just stayed there. Even the chorus is about searching for lost love songs, searching for the perfect song and its inspiration. I feel like I’ll never been done searching for the perfect love song.”

Elsewhere on the album, Capoccia and bandmates Derek McSwain (mandolin) and Dean Shakked (upright bass) continue to present a rootsy, raw look at life on the move. Through the ebb and flow of love and loss, wild nights and the emotional hangover that follows, other tracks like the banjo-laden “Burn That Bridge” were also written in Antarctica, while “Sugarcane” and its sweet-hearted romance were born in an an AirBnB in Boise, Idaho. On the other hand, the swaying “Mary the Night’s on Fire” was written on Capoccia’s long-time houseboat in Olympia — which was a big part of the secret behind his near-constant travel and songwriting quest. The rent was so cheap he didn’t feel the need to actually be there.

The band itself has a mix of influence from classic folk to Olympia’s thriving punk rock scene — which featured Capoccia in a few bands before The Pine Hearts — and the trio cut their teeth playing spur of the moment shows under a bridge leading to the city’s downtown. It’s just another aspect of a band that has never felt beholden to doing things by the Nashville playbook.

“I’ll say this, Nashville does seem a long way away,” Capoccia says.

Looking ahead, Capoccia says The Pine Hearts will continue that tradition of DIY creation — and that he’ll continue chasing his muse, even if it takes him to the ends of the earth.

“I’m just happy to be writing the next song, it’s a pursuit, and I can’t help it,” he says. “And to be honest, things are pretty smooth with the band and we’re playing together well, so I could keep doing that for the next 10 years and be pretty happy.”