Briston Maroney Presents: Paradise (3rd Annual Festival)

For Briston Maroney, it's been a journey to arrive at the current moment. A mental, physical, emotional, and musical one. But it's left him equipped: not only with a deep understanding of self, discovered through life's trials and errors, but just as important, with a piece of art that reflects his personal growth. Sunflower, Maroney's debut album, is the culmination of the past decade of the now-22-year old's life. "It's all of the things I've been stoked about since I was 12 coming together," the wise-beyond-his-years, Nashville-based singer-songwriter says with a laugh of his striking album. "It's been a literal and physical relationship with the record as far as coming to a point where I understand what parts of me it represents, what it means to me as a person and what it means for my entire life."

Recorded between the summer of 2019 and early 2020 in LA with acclaimed producer John Congleton, Sunflower is "definitely a milestone," Maroney admits. "I'd be lying to say I didn't feel a little bit of that. And why not let yourself enjoy it?" It's also a gut-punch of fuzzy power chords ("Sinkin") and genteel acoustics ("Cinnamon"); deftly-composed pop songs ("Freeway") and hard-charging rockers ("Rollercoaster"). "I put all of myself into it," Maroney adds of the 10-track LP. In retrospect, he adds, "I definitely have this sense of calmness now. I did what I was capable of doing and I'm just glad I was around my friends and my people to help me get to this point."

An energetic live performer with a craft first honed in basements, living rooms, and jam-packed clubs, Maroney quickly developed a style steeped in the sweat and sounds of Nashville's DIY scene. After self-releasing his 2017 debut EP Big Shot and amassing a strong local fan base, Maroney ultimately attracted the attention of Canvasback Music. After signing with the label, his subsequent releases -- Carnival (2018), Indiana (2019), and Miracle (2020) -- remained entirely self-written with just a single producer credited on each project, namely Grammy Award-winning producer Tone Def and UK-based producer Jim Abbiss (Arctic Monkeys, Adele).

When Maroney began to tour the US and Europe alongside other artists, co-writing sessions became commonplace as they created music together while on the road. It was at this point he made the conscious decision that he would seek out additional songwriters and producers to work with on his debut full-length project; as Maroney's music world grew, so too did his desire for collaboration.

While Maroney is the first to admit he was 'terrified-in-a-good-way' to be working alongside top-notch talents with the likes of Manchester Orchestra's Andy Hull and venerated songwriter Dan Wilson on the creation of Sunflower, over time he came to understand a simple lesson. That being, "If you're approaching what you're doing from a place of love and kindness and passion you can be as open and flowing artistically as you want to be with your collaborators," he says. "I learned a ton from writing with those people," Maroney continues. "I think the biggest thing I took away is you get to decide how open you want to be, and you get to decide how much of a stage you want to set for emotions in songwriting."

If there was a sense of apprehension heading into such sessions, it's only because songwriting, for Maroney, has long been such a highly personal process. "It's been my journal for a really long time," he explains. "There's a beauty in songwriting. It's a scrapbook. It's a photo album. And if you're really putting your heart into what you're doing and writing songs for the right reasons, every one of them should take you back to a very specific place." For Maroney, the songs that comprise Sunflower take him along the long and winding path to the present, from his time as a young, upstart-tween musician busking at the Knoxville farmer's markets to playing dank basement gigs, sobering up amid personal struggles, and finally arriving right now at his most fully-realized self.

"Hopefully this record is representative of my journey," Maroney says, singling out the opening track "Sinkin" as summing up the record to him in a single cut. "Here's 100 percent of who I am," he says of the brash and bursting song. "It feels the most connected to my heart."

"I hope that people hear the record and see the songs as windows into what I've been experiencing and hopefully they'll relate to that," Maroney says, continuing. "I know these songs will continue to do that for me."

Working with producer John Congleton, Maroney explains, was about learning to trust his impulse. While Maroney had long been the first to question initial instincts, Congleton taught him to respect his gut. "He communicates really directly and really taught me a lot about speaking precisely and speaking about what you want to accomplish with a song and a record," Maroney recalls. "Whereas I have a tendency to be really abstract. I learned to be able to switch into that mode. He had my back the whole time."

Maroney gushes as he reflects on the session with Congleton that resulted in "It's Still Cool If You Don't." Their initial stab at writing together, "was the first experience of really letting go," Maroney contends of the song. "Just coming in and having a silly idea and being down to see where it goes." Working on "Cinnamon" alongside seasoned songwriter Jenny Owens Young, which Maroney describes as a "quieter more low-key song," was by contrast an exercise in "being all gushy" and exploring his feelings on love. "That was really fun to write a love song with someone else who was also in love with a person," Maroney offers.

Where "Rollercoaster," an older track that Maroney and his band typically closed out their sets with, was his attempt at getting a bit raucous, the track "Deep Sea Diver," which Maroney penned with Dan Wilson, was a far more meditative affair. Or as Maroney says with a laugh, "It's like, well, if this really pissed off angry rock thing doesn't work here's my best attempt at trying to be John Prine."

If anything, the process of assembling Sunflower was the best way Maroney learned to take his foot off the gas a bit and ease into his life in a more gratifying way. Where he admits at times throughout the recording process he was "squeezing it so hard," completing a brilliant debut album to him "was so much about just learning to be a little more laid back," Maroney says with a smile. "I still feel really connected to it, but I'm so stoked to share it and especially one day play it live," Maroney adds of Sunflower. "Right now, I am just so thankful and happy."

The I-Ching, often translated as The Book of Change, is an ancient Chinese divination text that maps out 64 transitions that you could possibly be going through at any time, reflected in the form of hexagrams. Los Angeles-based Adrian Galvin, who performs ecstatic folk pop as Yoke Lore, views his debut record Toward a Never Ending New Beginning, as his own book of change. It is the definition of a life as a set of transitions: from celebrations to moments of sadness to moments of stillness. All of it is connected, all of it is related.

Galvin has been immersed in music for his whole life. He grew up in New York, to a highly creative, intensely spiritual family. His Jewish mother was a filmmaker who ran Hebrew school classes out of his childhood home. His Catholic father worked as a therepist and a sculptor. Shabbat dinners involved lots of singing, an embrace of the spiritual and the ancient by way of song. Amidst his journey in music, Galvin also explored dance and co-founded the dance company Boomerang in the mid 2010’s. Growing up with photographers and painters in his family, he was immersed in the visual arts from a young age. Galvin draws nearly all of the visual art for the project. In his words, “Yoke Lore is a cohesive form of expression assembled from a life of dabbling in the becoming.”

When it came time to head off to college, Galvin chose Kenyon, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, where he met the members of his first band, and joined Walk The Moon as their drummer. When the band had their first hit song, “Anna Sun,” about professing loveloss to his sophomore year sociology professor by the same name, Galvin dropped out of school and the band went on the road. Galvin eventually stepped away from Walk The Moon, and worked towards figuring out what he wanted from music next. He stuidied meditation in India, taught yoga all over the world, started a screamo folk band called Poor Remy, and picked up the banjo after a trip to Boone, North Carolina to visit an aunt.

Banjo became a guiding light for Galvin, it is the instrument that has shaped Yoke Lore. The banjo is a storied instrument in the mythos of American music, a populist instrument, deliverance set to five strings. When Galvin started Yoke Lore in earnest, much of the sound was piloted around the banjo and his exploration of what he could express with it. Galvin’s rise has been unfaltering, becoming increasingly notable in the indie universe over time. Yoke Lore’s “Goodpain,” and “Ride,” charted #1 on College Radio. “Beige,” which was first released in 2017, went Gold in multiple countries recently following a nod from Taylor Swift and a viral TikTok run. He has racked up over 10 million views on YouTube and 500 million streams on Spotify.

He started writing the songs for Toward a Never Ending New Beginning in the late 2010s, and finished an earlier version of the record right before the pandemic started. But then everything changed. Suddenly the music he had written had lost some of its resonance. He took some time away from it. He made an original score for the movie ‘Pink Skies Ahead’ (released by MTV Entertainment), and also wrote all the music for the AppleTV childrens series ‘Get Rolling With Otis.’ Then he went back to Yoke Lore: penning hundreds of songs in a bubble of persistent seclusion. Galvin also went through two major break ups around this time: with a long time manager and a serious girlfriend. All of that went into the music, infused itself into the sonics. “I want to tell stories about how memories, relationships, apprehensions, and big dreams hold us together. I think that exploring universal experiences both emotional and spiritual is best conveyed through the potency of personal narrative. And music wields a power to render the very personal, epic.”

 “Winona” is the first single from the forthcoming album. The song is a billowing melody of frantic banjo strums and roaring percussion. It’s a bittersweet attempt to understand the all too human habit of self-sabotage. It’s a song about heartache and a yearning for a love that now only exists in one’s memories. But true to his desire to make such introspections transcendent, Galvin doesn’t stop there, pin-pointing his desperation for love as one of the reasons things didn’t work out in the first place. “But she said love can’t just be an escape, cause then it’s not the real thing,” he croons over the racing acoustic riffs.

“Shake,” is the record’s second single. One day Galvin unmoored and living in Brooklyn, was laying around and he came across an ancient Chinese oracle called the I-Ching or Book of Change. He threw some coins and divined a hexagram made up of six stacked lines. It was called Zhen or Shake. It told him that he was at an inflection point. It demanded that he shake himself up out of the malaise or things would go septic. The image of shake is a thunderbolt, of light rising from the east, of beginnings. We all go through periods of stale stagnation. We all experience the alluring pull of inertia. But you never drink from a sitting pool of water. That's where bacteria and disease breeds. Our bodies and our lives have to be lived in motion. Time is a cycle, life is a continuum, and we are never the same person we were yesterday. If we stay the same, we fail to grow, we get brittle in the body, we get stubborn in the mind, and we go blind in the heart. By embracing the flux inherent in our nature, we can find some harmony. “Shake” is a pristine pop track, synthesizers variegate, Galvin’s vocals are clear, self-aware, earnest.

Galvin discovers how his songs feel by playing them live for people. He’s a prolific touring artist, having opened for artists such as Bastille, Bishop Briggs, Mt. Joy, Goth Babe among others. Seeing how his music affects his audience teaches him about how his music works. To celebrate the release of Toward a Never Ending New Beginning, which comes out on September 22, Galvin will go on a 23 date North American headlining tour, starting in Philadelphia on August 19^th 2023.

There are one million ways to approach love, one million ways to experience love, one million ways in which love shapes both the course of our lives and how we choose to navigate that course. On her second album, Bnny’s Jessica Viscius looks love square in its many eyes and describes, with self-awareness and humor, not only what she sees, but what it makes her feel. Deep romantic love, breathy lust, generous self-love—and their opposites, self-loathing, resentment, disappointment—all make appearances on One Million Love Songs, Bnny’s
revelatory second album.

Bnny’s debut, Everything, was written in the face of tragedy, following the death of Viscius’ partner, fellow Chicago musician Trey Gruber. It was a raw, honest album whose songs seemed to emanate from Viscius like a personal climate. Pitchfork called Everything “a beautiful record
from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs.” And while those songs have not lost an ounce of their power, performing them every night live across the US and Europe made for a new and different kind of exhaustion. It’s hard to access your grief all the time; it’s even harder to share it. “I wanted to make songs that are exciting to play—songs that make me feel happy,” Viscius says. “This album is about love after loss, getting older, and just trying to have fun with a broken heart.”

True to form, One Million Love Songs is a brighter, fuller record that shows Viscius’ immense growth as an arranger and artist. “Good Stuff” begins as soft slowcore, with a touch of Echo and the Bunnymen, but as it wakes up, Viscius channels the sunny chords and at-ease ’90s charm. “I’m hanging on to the sunshine,” she sings, her voice full and rich and carrying both the giddiness that line implies and an awareness of how silly that giddiness can feel. “Something Blue” rises, sighs, and rests in its own tension, Viscius’ voice calm with a self-assured form of acceptance. In “Changes,” she hangs a simple lyric on a straightforward melody like a sheet being draped over a clothesline, channeling Mazzy Star and mimicking the soft, gauzy, fresh feeling of realizing you’re able to begin it all again with a new person. “So happy I could scream,” she sings, and then she does.

Oh, but sadness can have its pleasures, too. “Heartbreak can be fun when you put things into perspective and think about how absurd and fleeting life is,” Viscius says. One Million Love Songs was written in the wake of a breakup that prompted a period of deep introspection and a
grappling with her own self-destructive tendencies. Many of the songs here take it as a given
that love will end. In “Crazy, Baby,” Viscius lays out her approach to love songs: “write one quick
’cause nothing lasts,” she sings, suggesting that any attempt to capture the green shoots of
love’s first moments also carries within it the dying and decaying of the tree. “Sweet” is humid
with self-loathing, a nearly bluesy lament in the vein of the Velvet Underground’s third record.
“I’m so sweet,” she sings, her voice venomous with sarcasm, “don’t you want to get to know
me?”

One Million Love Songs was recorded in Asheville at Drop of Sun and produced by Viscius alongside Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, Snail Mail), As with Everything, Bnny is primarily Viscius’ solo project, with assistance from her twin sister Alexa Viscius and a rotating
cast of friends. The cover is a photo Alexa took of Jess while they were backpacking in Alaska. It’s an ambiguous image—you can read Viscius as relaxed and at ease, or you can read her as completely wiped out and drained. It’s an image that exists out of time, like the love song itself—songs that will always be relevant because people will always find themselves drawn to and apart from one another, with the millions and millions of complications those movements bring. The idea is to embrace all of it while remembering that everything passes. It seems instructive that the last thing Viscius sings on this album is “No one loves me anymore.” It seems equally instructive that she sounds completely free.

Hana Eid wants to write songs that feel like “the love letters you’re too afraid to send.” Combining confessional lyricism with raw vocal performances and earworm melodies, she tells stories that feel like they’ve been pulled straight from the depths of listeners’ minds.

She first picked up a guitar when she was 8 years old and has since spent her adolescence crafting an emotive indie rock sound that takes inspiration from the likes of Wednesday, Lucy Dacus, and Big Thief. Now a 21-year-old based in Nashville, she started off 2024 with the release of her debut EP, I Exist Because You Say So and a packed headline release show at The Blue Room. 

The EP is an introspective time capsule of her past year told through lenses of both grit and vulnerability, produced by close collaborator Tone Def (Briston Maroney, The Moss, Gatlin). Quickly commanding the attention of fans and industry voices alike, it received acclaim from Ones To Watch, Atwood Magazine, Early Rising, Bad Wreck Media, and Pleaser Magazine to name a few. Songs from the project were also featured on Spotify’s New Music Friday, Lorem, Undercurrents, Front Page Indie, and Today’s Indie Rock, as well as Apple Music’s New In Indie & Sad Times.

Already diving into creating her next project, Hana is eager to reveal all that’s to come later this year. She shares, “I think loving people and making music are probably the most likely ways I can leave the world better than I found it,” and this sincerity is bound to carry her to the forefront of modern indie rock.