A few weeks back we introduced Win A Trip To Palm Springs!, the new album from Texas-based songwriter Brody Price on Niles City Records, with the single, ‘It Was You‘. Offering a view of the softer side of what Price semi-seriously calls his ‘doom folk’ style, the song was indicative of the album’s tender and often playful mood. An authentic engagement with the difficult side of life which refuses to succumb to maudlin yearning or fatalistic cynicism, instead working with enough patience and curiosity to allow the full spectrum of emotions to coexist.
The formation of such a mindset is central to Win A Trip To Palm Springs! “I grew up in a really sheltered conservative household and dealt with some pretty nasty mental health issues my whole life,” Price explains. “I had never really stood up for myself or done anything just because I wanted to.” But a geological expedition to Joshua Tree, where Price studied seventy million-year-old magma bodies, opened his eyes to different types of people and alternate ways of living. “Being out there for the first time was so cathartic,” he continues. “I couldn’t believe that I was this kid from south Texas that had ended up working with folks from all over the world in one of the most other-worldly places I’d ever seen.”
More than the purely physical escape from Texas, the trip represented a wider freeing. An epiphanic moment which dismantled ways of thinking and ultimately allowed Brody Price to confront personal trials on his own terms. To finally end up becoming himself, doom folk and all. The significance of the album’s title begins to emerge in this context. The record essentially inviting the listener into this new headspace. A place where there is no need to beat oneself up, where all moods are recognised as natural and suffering is a fact but never final. Win a trip to Palm Springs and you can start becoming yourself too.
The mood is captured in a whole host of forms across the record, from the fond folk of ‘It Was You’ to the crushing country sludge of ‘Dying When I Met You’ and the slow weight of ‘Satellites and Dust’. But with its forgiving warmth and tongue-in-cheek charm, final single ‘Fall’ is perhaps the clearest encapsulation. “This song is about this repeating cycle in which I often find myself,” Brody Price explains. “It involves making mistakes, feeling regret and remorse for those mistakes, changing course based on what you’ve learned from the experience and then finding yourself right back in the same situation.”
But true to the spirit of the record, the subject matter is approached from an angle of levity and compassion. “I didn’t want to approach the idea from some self loathing sad-boy perspective,” Price continues. “I wanted it to be practical, like ‘this has happened before and everything turned out okay. So hang in there, things will likely turn out okay again.'” What emerges follows in the lineage of songwriters who take on suffering with wry humour and self awareness, from Leonard Cohen and Jerry Jeff Walker to St. John Prine himself, and Will Johnson and John Paul White help to build a bright rhythm in support. “I’m prone to really really deep sadness and isolation,” as Price concludes, “but that doesn’t mean that I forget how to laugh.”
Win A Trip To Palm Springs! is out now via Niles City Records and you can get it from the Brody Price Bandcamp page.