“Wie weet wat voor fraais de toekomst in petto heeft voor Brian Dunne”, schreef ik vorig jaar na het verschijnen van diens verzamelalbum Brian Dunne op het label van Danny Vera. Veel sneller dan ik had gehoopt verschijnt nu het uitstekende Loser on the Ropes. “Ik ben geobsedeerd door falen. Het is zoveel interessanter voor mij dan succes, zoveel eerlijker en menselijker.", aldus Brian. Het album is melodieuzer dan voorgaande albums. Muzikaal gezien werd hij voor dit album vooral beïnvloed door The Pretenders, Jonathan Richman en Dire Straits. Het album werd opgenomen en geproduceerd in de winter 2021/2022 in Athens, GA door Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Of Montreal). Op Sometime After This na, welke geproduceerd werd door Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver), met wie Brian al zijn hele carrière samenwerkt. Bijgaand de achtergrondinformatie van Brian zelf over de liedjes :
1. Loser On The Ropes
The mission statement for the album. I wanted to center the
listener in where I was coming from, where I was currently at, and then state my
objective for track one, side one. I'm no longer interested in mincing words
and drowning my messages in metaphors to make them digestible, because who has
the time for that anymore? So this one’s a pretty bare bones message-- if I'm
going down, I might as well say what I really mean this time. I like it.
2. Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors
Any New Yorker knows the phrase "Stand Clear Of The
Closing Doors" because it's what comes over the loudspeaker on the subway
at every stop. I hadn't ridden the train in a while because of the thing
(trying not to mention the pandemic for the entirety of this album campaign) so
when I hopped back on in mid-summer 2020, I really "heard" it for the
first time. Get in or get out, but get out of the way. And that's really how I
was feeling. So I wrote this narrative about a character who's spent a lot of
time 'live, laugh, loving' her way through the modern world, only to be jolted
by a revolutionary awakening. And she has to make a choice, whether to embrace
it, or run from it. It's really an indictment of my younger self, if I'm being
honest.
3. Rockaway
This is the first song I wrote for the record. I had just
turned 30, the year every musician is sure they will turn into a pumpkin, and I
was thinking about my identity moving forward. In the face of the dystopian
madness of the last few years, I felt pretty useless being a relatively obscure
singer of songs, and this is me trying to make sense of it. It's set at my
favorite place, Rockaway Beach in Queens, on the boardwalk overlooking the beach,
which is a pretty great place to have an existential crisis. Anyways, I feel
like I didn't describe it that well, but it's a nice song, it kinda sounds like
Fleet Foxes or some shit.
4. It's A Miracle
It's my belief that, gun to head, everyone kind of feels
like a loser. I don't know why. But give a very successful soul a few drinks
and some bad news, and they'll tell you why they're a fraud or a fuck up or a
failure. I'm no different. Maybe it's growing up with the internet or social
media, or maybe it's just high standards, or maybe we are total losers-- totally
possible! Either way, it's no way to go around living your life. I wanted this
song to be about shame and failure, and a real honest picture of what people
feel ashamed of. And maybe it's a song to my people to not be so hard on themselves.
But it's also about how, basically, if you don't have blood on your hands in this
day and age, you're at least doing better than all the people who are
destroying the world, so maybe give yourself some credit for that, because
those people do not lose any sleep at night. Fuckers.
5. The Kids Are All Grown
This one is particularly near and dear to me. It's about the
cold feeling where I come to, in a sea of people, and realize everyone I know
is gone. They've all grown up, but I'm still a kid, and yet, I don't want to
leave. It's sort of a stress dream, played out in real time, about realizing
the years have passed you by and you can never have them back. I'm not very
good with change.
6. Sometime After This
I would say this song, for me, is the emotional pinnacle of the
album. At its core, it’s my way of saying "this too shall pass" but
in a way that feels honest, and not like a HomeGoods wall stencil. It starts
with a big idea and gets smaller with each verse—the first one addresses the
social and political state of things, and how sad it is that we can't even
agree on what it is that we disagree about (and also has the first, and likely
last use of the word "email" in one of my songs). Verse two is about
everything that led me here, to this particular song, and finds me asking a
classic NYC vampire- a sacred character to me- what exactly to do with it. And
verse three is just about a single cup of coffee and how it all just comes down
to that; being grateful for a hot beverage. Something like that.
7. Optimist
I tried on a lot of hats in my twenties; some literal and very
unfortunate. I suppose I've always been slightly agitated, and I've spent most
of my life trying to fix that. So I went in search of a lot of personalities
that didn't suit me very well. I tried nihilist, I tried dark philosopher --
those were insufferable, sorry everyone. I've tried druggie and alcoholic, I've
entertained the idea of full blown anarchist. But none of it ever stuck. It's
kind of disappointing when you realize, "Oh god, I think I'm an
optimist." But it's true. I'm just a very bad optimist. That's what this
song is about, and about how optimism tends to have diminishing returns, so you
have to try twice as hard, forever and ever, in perpetuity. It's the saddest
song written about being an optimist.
8. Thinking Of A Place
I was thinking about how the line between daydreaming and
dissociation is so very fine. Disassocation? Dissociation? I don't know. Anyways,
as a fella with a bit of a daydreaming problem, I can pretty easily fall into
myself. I wrote this as a bit of a horror movie, where the protagonist starts
with some harmless fantasticizing and ends completely catatonic at a stop
light. Spooky.
9. Call It A Weakness
By now, you are probably very sick of me and I am too, so I
wrote this song about someone else completely. It's sort of a meditation on someone
who's been pushed to the margins and what led them there. I think there's not
enough empathy for those kinds of people.
10. Bad Luck
No one is getting out alive, so even though this song seems
like a cautionary message, I actually thought it to be liberating. It's out of
our control, so just get out there. You can be the most careful person in the
world and then Billy Joel just drives into your fucking house in the spring of
2004. This song is about that incident.
11. Something To Live For
Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in. Isn't that what's so oddly comical about our lives? Just when you think you're done- you will not be reborn, you will not be surprised by a change in the seasons, you will no longer get excited by a sale at The Gap, you've seen it all and The Gap is not even close to good anymore- something or someone catches you off your guard, and there you are again. Falling in love like a beautiful sucker. Catching the first breeze of fall. Standing outside The Gap, waiting for it to open. It never ceases to amaze me and it turns me into a puddle of hopeful mush. It felt like a good way to close the album, because I felt like we earned it.
Naast een steeds meer florerende solocarrière maakt Brian ook deel uit van de band Fantastic Cat, met welke hij op 1 mei te zien zal zijn op het Roots & Roses Festival in Lessines, België.
Theo Volk
Releasedatum : 14 april 2023 PMD Records/Kill Rock Stars
Website : https://www.briandunnemusic.net/