When I met Brianna’s muse in the old days of 2017 when The Time Of Darkness and Punishment was a ways off, I met a young woman who dances down all the streets. No, all the fucking streets, my dear. She bounced between NYC and Western Mass and here and about and I thought her very much a young Patti Smith, peering over the edge to see if the best stuff was there. And then, upon seeing that it indeed was, getting a running start and leaping. When I was fifteen Patti Smith sort of terrified me, she of the Rimbaud and the hairy armpits and the raw, jarring Mappelthorpianisms. The terror that was revealed, however, revealed itself as compelling and productive. It was the pleasant realization that women could be bandits and scoundrels just as much as men, driven in base ways towards celestial ends. And this for me at fifteen boded very well indeed; this made what was to come infinitely more interesting.

Bri, she’s something else, it’s gotta be poly-everything. I swear I haven’t heard that prefix so much since listening to “Polythene Pam” a thousand times. In fact, she has a new nickname. I’ll be calling her Polly going forward. Thing is, “poly” always seems to mean something cool in music. “Polyrhythms” and “polychords” just sound enticing. This very association is what led me to use an extremely challenging polychord cadence in the bridges of “Will I Ever Know”. It is musical onomotopeia.

Bri lives in these songs the way other people live in apartments in Hell’s Kitchen or Frank Lloyd Wright hellscapes in Bel Air. She rearranges the furniture. She leaves with the gas on and burns the thing down if she wants to. Some songs pick up that Beat-evoking vibe with their breathless, run-on narratives (more musical onomotopoeia). “Water Me Down” evokes a mind seeking a way out of itself, a prison, a double-bind. The wind-up-release pattern of the structure features a deep feeling of expansion and passion in the big sections but always with a return to hushed resignation, desperation.

What I’ve always noticed with Brianna’s melodies is that they carry very little harmonic implication from the time after Gershwin. Her lines, her strophes, are largely self-implying, self-contained. These are not melodies that were going to be properly supported with barre chords on a guitar. Steven Foster was in there, Aaron Copeland was in there, even that arch modernist Cole Porter was in there, he of the black keys and the light heart. There was something going on with long melodic phrases and big jumps. In songs like “Never Alone” and “Will I Ever Know” there are endless extensions in the melodic lines. There are ninths and elevenths and there are flat fifths. There are ii(minor)major7-V13b5 cadences. They are all there, waiting for a cunning and obsessive mind steeped in jazz and classical arrangement to have a field day.

Usually these things don’t happen, it’s the way of nature. Nature uses the shotgun model to proliferate. A quintillion sperm, one offspring. The Lennons don’t usually meet the McCartneys, middle-class families in Hawthorne CA don’t kick out a Brian and a Dennis and a Carl in short order. Trust me, I’ve seen things miss that would have created galaxies if they’d collided. So much is lost, so much is lost. I decide to see it as an expression of abundance. Or I’ll go insane.

So it’s really, really good that Brianna and I met. We may not be Lennon/McCartney but these beautiful songs get to be born. I’m always looking for a thing where I can get away with being ambitious, it often earns me a rebuke. I love music so much that I always want to compress it and enrich it and refine it, I’m very much a white male that way. I like to take the coca leaves and purify them into the Merck pharmaceutical cocaine from the ‘70s that Keith Richards always goes on about, bless his immortal heart. Being presented with something like “My Lover” or god forbid “Love Like This” is to be presented with a fait accompli; one simply colors by the numbers. It’s just that the numbers are like x/y-pi (e2*2L/7y.

The strongest implication in “Water Me Down” is the good old Pink Floydian ii-V. And its natural landing spot in D minor (come on, Xers, say it with me…. “the saddest of all keys…”) is made resonant by the sixth that continually becomes the third of the V chord. I believe it’s called a “harmonic minor” but I don’t wish much to be drawn. This song is a textbook example of many of Brianna’s melodic extensions and suspensions. In the first line of the loud sections, i.e. “….how could he ever know me…” we are given a ninth, a fourth and a sixth (the one that defines the mode). To music geeks such as myself the terms will revolve around Locrian and Ionian modes. To normal people it will land as “something interesting and arresting” These mean the same thing.

It amuses me that the first glimpse of the larger body of work to come is so rockist. There is more than the faintest hint of “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin in the enormous drums-and-strings thing, this was even more fun to create than you could intuit. John Paul Jones stood over my shoulder on the string arrangement, but it was also the John Paul Jones of “Automatic For The People”, the critical REM album for which he arranged the critical strings so ably.

Anyway, it ended up being a real Wuthering Heights of a recording, a gothic drama wrapped in gauze and lit by a clouded moon. I don’t know if there will be much forthcoming on our project with this sort of attack but I imagine songs like “Love Like This” and “Eyes Full Of Stars” will be reticent to hide their wild hearts. We shall have to see with the girl, if she chooses to dance down this street on the right day at the right time.

Usually these things don’t happen, you see; it’s the way of nature.

—Robert Sherwood
composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter