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More Dead Than Alive 2:260:00/2:26
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I Will 3:520:00/3:52
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My Baby Left Home 1:500:00/1:50
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A Better Man Than I 3:400:00/3:40
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New Bruise 3:030:00/3:03
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With a Song 3:180:00/3:18
The songs found on Richard Brisbois' new set Between the Light and Me are spare, emotionally naked meditations on love, loss, grief and mortality (the EP’s title is a line from an Emily Dickinson poem about dying).
“It’s a collection of moments, really,” says the song writer. “Most of the songs came really fast. And I recorded them the same way. I wanted to capture the feeling of how the songs came to me. Like they just kind of descended. From somewhere outside of me.”
Brisbois was living in Twisp, Washington, a small town at the eastern base of the North Cascades, when he he began recording for the EP. “I was living in this old house in Twisp. There was no central heating… we heated the bottom floor of the house with an old pot-bellied stove. In winter you had to wade out into the back yard through the snow, which there was a lot of, to chop the wood and bring it into the house. I would look out the window and see deer walking down the street. At night you could hear the coyotes.”
There is a stillness to the songs, a hushed reverence informed by the solitude and grandeur of the landscape Brisbois was living in at the time. He finished recording the set when he returned to the west side of the Cascades, where he now lives in Tacoma, Washington.
Most of the songs are built around acoustic guitar. There are chiming mandolins too, and thick, ghostly synth flourishes. At times just a guitar and Brisbois’ voice: untrained and scarred by years of shouting over electric guitars and crashing drums. But honest, and vulnerable. Filled with the ache of being human. Knowing that love always comes with a price. Yet having the strength, and wisdom, to pay it.
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"On his first solo LP Anytime You Think About Her, Seattle’s Brisbois abandoned the blasting guitars of his ‘90s roots-rock outfit 4 Hr. Ramona for something drastically more hushed. Brisbois’s bio compares his music to Wilco and R.E.M., but you’ll also hear Neil Halstead [Slowdive, Mojave 3], and Grant McLennan [Go-Betweens]… Brisbois’s compassionate folk is mollifying."
- Mark Suppanz, The Big Takeover
