BRYAN AWAY is how Chicago’s Elliott Korte finally and shyly comes to the world of a music with a rather tasty take on acoustic-driven baroque pop.
We fell a little bit hard for his first single, “The Lake”, at the beginning of the month, noting it as being “a dusky beauty, piano-led, graceful, the kinda song you can wrap yourself in against the depredations of the world while fully acknowledging the fragility of it all. Or, put it another way: a cracker.” (Watch the video, hear the track for yourself, here).
Gather around, folks, hear his new single, “Scenes From A Wedding”, right now.
If you love the finely honed songcraft of Andy Shauf, Elliott Smith, Sam Prekop and Jim O’Rourke – full of melody but not shy of a little angularity, a little off-kilter melodic thing, you gotta hear what Bryan’s bringing. Folky, jazzy, stop-start lush.
Elliott came to music, in a publicly shared sense, relatively late; acting seemed to be his chosen creative path. He played Ted Danson’s son on the television show Damages (lining up also alongside William Hurt, John Hannah, Glenn Close et al) and had parts in a few indie films. He was studying computing at college; but, y’know, it was the music that really spoke to him. All the time he was working, very privately, on his first album, The Educated Youth; no one had heard it.
His road to Damascus moment, musically, came when he wrote “Give In” in 2019. “I wrote that song and it was definitely a moment where I came to terms with what I hadn’t been doing, and what I needed to be doing,” he says. “That was a big realization.”
Canyons to Sawdust, the album, will be with us in early July and, natch, features the track you can hear herein.
Bryan Away’s Canyons To Sawdust will be released digitally on July 9th, and is available to pre-order right now over at Bandcamp.
Connect with Bryan at his website and on Facebook and Instagram.
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