Bryan Perri - Few Words (2024)

Bryan Perri is an award-winning music supervisor, orchestrator, arranger, music director, and conductor. He has built a substantial career working on some of the biggest, most widely recognized Broadway musicals of the last 20 years, making him one of the key players behind many household names in musical theater.

But among the seemingly endless deluge of sung and spoken words with which his professional world is brimming, Perri sought something else, something less dependent on explicit meaning. Perri’s debut album, Few Words, sits at the intersection of neoclassical, art rock, ambient, and electronic music, and represents an aesthetic hybridization of old and new ideas, amidst emotional and conceptual depths.

Words are ubiquitous in theatrical genres and at times ironically limit the extent to which one can express themself fully. This album represents the liberation from the limiting factors of words and rhyming, the predictability of time and the fear of judgment. Perri sees the record as a set of invitations into changing landscapes of sound and evolving themes of trauma and healing.

In “Exploration for Guitars and Strings,” one can hear influences from Bela Bartok to Frank Zappa driving a relentless rhythm with brief stops into lyric, melodic and soulful passages reminiscent of a Debussy tone poem. Atonal aspects of this piece bring to mind a world where Emerson Lake and Palmer or Robert Fripp meets György Ligeti. “Ephemerality,” a piece in five movements, is quasi-operatic –– even theatrical –– in nature, without conforming to the constraints that can often be present in both genres. Five singers’ voices interweave with the warmth of low strings, keyboards and electronic elements to create an environment that highlights the fleeting nature of meaning. The “lyrics” are all drawn from existential and stoic philosophical texts in various languages and are not meant to be explicitly understood. Instead, this vocal texture –– at times challenging and at times beautiful –– attempts to simulate the experience of a mind constantly shifting focus, trying to find grounding in the chaos of thought and existence. “Ambient Words” is a peaceful but unquiet answer to “Ephemerality,” a grounding foil to the challenges presented in that piece, while “No Words” for string quintet and piano is a more tonal offering, an expression of contemplative joy.

At the heart of Perri’s music is the intense desire of a swirling and turbulent mind to be seen, heard and healed. Through the use of electric guitars, rhythmic strings, soaring voices and unconventional sounds, Perri aims to cut through the noise of the world around us to get at some sense of steadfast truth.

Already a deeply accomplished and multifaceted musical mind, with the release of Few Words, the world will meet Bryan Perri as a composer and artist in his own right, a contemporary of Nico Muhly or Bryce Dessner.