render tender / blunder sunder [CD]

Blending traditional sensibilities with contemporary concerns, render tender / blunder sunder arrives ready to propel listeners into the heart of songwriter Jude Brothers’ rich emotional experience – journeying through the underworld of doubt, longing, heart-break, and loss of identity, and arriving on the other side lighter, at a place of expansiveness and healing. Recorded over two days in a light-filled and scrub-jay surrounded room on a mesa in Lamy, New Mexico, the album is suffused Brothers’ extended search for space, clarity, and expression following profound grief and doubt in the bizarre and often-public end of a long and fruitful romantic and musical partnership. Listeners accompany Brothers as they move through the dismantling of both artistic and private dreams and identities, confronting the reality of separation, and reasserting their distinct creative voice. The eight track record, a stripped down and honest presentation of Brothers’ free-form compositions on tenor guitar and Celtic lever harp, displays their ease working within the framework of American Folk Music paradigms – gleaned from a musical childhood in Northwest Arkansas, steeped in its attendant regional influences – and enriched through their abiding and engaged love of various world folk traditions. Gliding atop delicately plucked harp-laden lullabies and adventurous freak-folk romps is Brothers’ effortless, playful, and expressive lyricism, propelled by a fearless and dynamic vocal range reminiscent of Karen Dalton, Joanna Newsom, and Joni Mitchell. Living at the intersection of heartbreak and psycho-drama, the collected songs of render tender / blunder sunder fall beautifully within the tradition of music that interrogates life – in this case, the often-baffling distances that can exist between what is imagined and what is lived, what is remembered and what is still being learned.