Brian Grainger – Summer's Parting Ways (2020)

Summer's Parting Ways was written and recorded following Brian's Eight Thousander release in 2007, and over those 11 years it has hung on the vine, a fabled sun-cast apple in a subtropical orchard. Crafted with possibly more care and deliberation than just about anything else in his prolific catalog, Summer's Parting Ways consists of detuned acoustic and electric guitars, played late into the nights and even later into the mornings of a humid Carolinian bedroom. Backed by a lethargic assembly of drum machines, organ pedal bass and a fair share of guest appearances from friends, and laid to honest warm cassette tape, it is the culmination of recalled memories, hazy summers and lonesome drives through rural backroads, to the bittersweetness of vacant beach parties, teenage boredoms and wistful solitary introspection. It's a long wave goodbye to those times when summer's sunny days seemed endless and orange, before highschool naivete has all faded away and rendered the time down to just another month on the calendar. Summer's Parting Ways remembers all of those things, and all of the other places you always wondered about, roads you wished you had biked down, green woods you'd have certainly explored. It bottles up the sunshine, saccharine and soda pop into a psychedelic perfume that settles across the empty fields of your mind, planting seeds of sad magic. Blue skies, saltwater seas, forests of wonderment - all under its spell, missing the past, sleeping beneath weeping willows and the star blasted nights behind them. A golden hour etched into a circular mirror, echoing an infinity of melancholic Sundays for you to comfortably recall via the cracked diamond of nostalgia.