Grumbeaux Sets Names Once Erased Into Song on "Now Is Near"

"Now Is Near" was built to restore what history refused to record. Grumbeaux composed the track directly from lyrics written by Tim Z. Hernandez, the researcher who spent more than a decade tracking down the identities of the passengers killed in a 1948 plane crash, people newspapers had called only "deportees" without bothering to learn their actual names.

That erasure ran deep enough to inspire Woody Guthrie's poem "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)," later recorded by Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and Dolly Parton, yet none of those recordings addressed the fact that the real people behind the tragedy remained unidentified for decades. Hernandez changed that through his books "All They Will Call You" and "They Call You Back," work significant enough that the passengers' names have since been read aloud at the California State Capitol and inscribed on a monument replacing the unmarked grave marker in Fresno.

Grumbeaux made "Now Is Near" for a documentary tracing Hernandez's own journey through that research, taking his written lyrics and shaping them into song. Critic Rick Moody has described the band's broader sound as folk-inflected material shot through with goth, prog, glam, and punk textures simultaneously, with unusual attention paid to the rhythm section, a description that suggests a band comfortable holding several genres in tension rather than settling into one.

That willingness to sit inside contradiction fits the subject matter well. A song built to honor people once stripped of their names carries real weight, and Grumbeaux's genre-blurring instincts give "Now Is Near" room to feel both mournful and defiantly alive rather than collapsing into a single, predictable tone.

"Now Is Near" asks listeners to hold history and memory together in real time, and Grumbeaux earns that responsibility by treating Hernandez's words as something to amplify rather than set to music.