Frank Meadows - Dead Weight (2022) Hi-Res

The piano-led songs that populate Dead Weight, the debut LP of singer-songwriter material from Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist Frank Meadows, are full of vivid photographic details that create the impression of transience. Each track feels like a private exercise in self-inquiry, archiving a passing epiphany or mode of being. Samples and snippets of field recordings string the songs together, investing the album with a constant sense of kinetic motion, connecting moments years or subway stops apart.

“‘Dead Weight’ connects the time I spent in 2010-2016 driving around North Carolina laying the foundations of my identity in music, and my life today as a New Yorker holding onto and celebrating my identity as a southerner,” Frank Meadows explains about the title track for his forthcoming album due in July. “Dead Weight” jangles in the deepest stretches of night where time is an afterthought examining the unfamiliar face that stares back in self-reflection.

Captivating, timeless keyboard arrangements dance across the simple rhythms and John Wallace’s subdued, emotive strums, all providing a glowing platform for Meadows’ dulcet voice. Flourishes from Justin Morris’s pedal steel are like flaked gold leaf imbuing the song with a sense of fading resilience. In the second chorus’s rising tide, Meadows, along with background vocals from Oliver Kalb and Alena Spanger, shines brightest before sauntering off toward the gilded horizon.

“My lifelong love of country music strangely kicked up a notch almost as soon as I moved to New York,” Meadows admits, ”and this track tries to express the process of arrival that comes from owning those dichotomies.” “Dead Weight” owns those realizations and wears them on its sleeve. Sometimes it doesn’t matter where we see ourselves within a larger context as long as we’re asking ourselves the hard questions Every mirror is a trick mirror, anyway.