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WGC albums have always confronted and contemplated life’s big themes — death, despair, misery, redemption — refracted through sepia-toned character portraits or metaphorical fables that sounded as old as the hills. For Regard the End, Fisher followed his band’s approach to what now seems its logical, natural conclusion: taking the lyrics of traditional folk and work songs and recasting them in a modern light by adding original music and then setting those works alongside entirely new WGC compositions. "I discovered, starting with Flying Low, that some of my songwriting was moving toward traditional themes and subject matter and tone. A few people who are fans of the music said to me, ‘Wow, that really sounds like a song that was written 150 years ago — that’s kind of a timeless song.’ So I started thinking, ‘What does that mean?’ And what it means is that I was reaching these universal subjects, and reaching into them in such a way that they seemed like they had existed before. As a songwriter, I thought it would be fun to explore that further."

Fisher envisioned his inquiry — scouring his collection of old Alan Lomax field recordings was his main modus operandi — as "an exercise in bringing something forward so that it doesn’t sound antiquated. People who want to hear things that sound antiquated tend to ghettoize it — they put it in a place where they can’t listen to it in a way that affects their current life. Ideally, I wanted people, unless they looked at the song credits, not to know what was what — that was my goal. Here are these songs that were written 200 years ago that have as much relevance and resonance now as they did then, maybe more so, because now they’ve been infused with 200 years of history."

The music on the new album is lush, lavish, and layered; a vibrant aural landscape of impeccably arranged guitars, pianos, trumpet, melodica, and strings. And unless you glance at the lyric booklet or have memorized more than a century’s worth of American folk and field recordings, it’s virtually impossible to say of the waltz-time "River in the Pines" and the roadside-preacher tale "The Trials of Harrison Hayes" which was written in the 1860s and which was written in 2000. "I’ve been getting e-mails from people who say it’s really nice that there’s an anti-war song on the record, and at first I thought, what anti-war song?", Fisher says of the bluesy, violin-steeped "Another Man Is Gone." "It’s a slave tune, but it made sense to them as an anti-war song. They’ve made the song their own."

Despite its somber connotations, the meaning behind the disc’s title, Fisher says, has as much to do with life and the living of it as it does with death. "The subject matter of the album is mortality, and I guess for me that’s the big theme in all of art, anyway — how you come to terms with your mortality sort of defines how you live your life."

Carried by a quiver of violin cross-stitching across pensive electric guitar, "The Ghost of the Girl in the Well" seems to embrace both of those extremes. Fisher wrote the lyrics a dozen years ago with a close friend, Manny Verzosa, and it’s based on a true story about a 14-year-old girl who is sexually abused and terrorized by a man "who owned my family." She flees and attempts to hide, only to fall into a well, where she dies alone and undiscovered. Kristin Hersh’s spectral vocal floats above Fisher’s and then plunges like an arrow into a heavy heart. The moment feels like a solitary sob — from the girl and for her — at the bottom of a pitch-black darkness.

When they first attempted the tune, neither Verzosa nor Fisher was happy with the music, so the song was set aside. Several years later, Verzosa was killed in an automobile accident while touring with the Silos. But in a sense, his voice, much like the ghost of that girl, lives on inside this song. "It’s extra special that Kristin’s on it, because he was a huge fan of hers. It’s funny, because Manny was on the first record [3 A.M. Sunday @ Fortune Otto’s, Dahlia Records, 1996] too. There’s a sound vérité piece that’s Chinese New Year in New York, and he recorded that and gave me the tape. When we were making the record, he had recently passed on, so my way of putting him on the record was putting that sound piece on it. Maybe his spirit infuses both records in a unique way. It’s kinda cool."