Two years ago, Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina, displacing families and reshaping communities across the region. Daniel Shearin, of the band River Whyless, was home in West Asheville when it hit. Now, on the storm’s second anniversary, River Whyless is releasing “One of a Thousand,” a song Shearin wrote about the storm and the hard questions it left behind.
BPR’s Helen Chickering spoke with Shearin about the song. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Scattered when the storm hit
"When Helene hit, we were all at home, and home for me is West Asheville. Home for the drummer Alex and the other guitarist and singer Ryan is in Swannanoa. Halli Anderson, singer and violinist, lives in Oregon. We didn’t really have a way to communicate, and we couldn’t really check in with each other. We didn’t really understand the scope of it beyond what we could see with our own eyes. Alex and Ryan lost access to and from their house and had to hike out, and I met them with a truck. Driving through all of that, those images are still stuck in my head.”
A riff, a verse, a family he barely knew
“I remember just sitting with the guitar, kind of playing a little bit of a riff or some chords, and I just started singing. And this is the first verse, more or less what came out. It was about one of the most heartbreaking stories of many. I knew one of the people a little bit, not well, but I knew her. For some reason I just couldn’t get that out of my head, and so whenever I started singing, that’s just kind of what came out.”
“One of a Thousand”
“After the storm, people kept describing Helene as a one-in-a-thousand-year event. But in the same breath, people were also treating it like it might happen again, like this could be the start of something new. That’s where the name comes from. The song is called One of a Thousand, which poses that same question: is it one in a thousand, or one of a thousand? I lean toward the one of a thousand, based on the way things are looking. And I’m hoping I’m wrong.”
Phantom thorn
“By the time I was writing those words, it hadn’t even been a year, and we had already seen the catastrophic, record-breaking fires in L.A., the record-breaking flooding in Texas, and then also in Valencia. In the song, I say the word phantom thorn, meaning I feel a pain when I hear these other stories. It’s more than just empathy. Before, hearing about these things was always painful, but it was based on empathy, imagining what that was like. But now it’s more like, we know what that’s like, and to even feel that again is painful.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m grateful in any way to have that experience, but I’m grateful for the perspective it’s given me.”
One of a Thousand is now available on Bandcamp, with a streaming release scheduled for September 28. .
