After earning his living as a sideman in New York City for most of his twenties, Graham Norwood decided to leave music behind when he married a painter joking that, “it seemed like if we wanted to have any kind of a stable life with a house and kids someday, we couldn’t both be allergic to money. I decided I should get a ‘real’ job and just let music be my hobby.” When his marriage started to fall apart, though, he returned to New York for a trial separation, and he instinctively found himself gravitating back towards music as a survival mechanism, as a way to work through the heartbreak and loneliness and confusion of it all.
Recorded with acclaimed producer/engineer Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Phish) and mixed by John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth), Norwood’s gorgeous and heart-wrenching debut, Out of the Sea (due out in January 2020), represents just a fraction of the music he wrote during that tumultuous period. Graham currently lives in San Francisco and has been legally since blind birth.
Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of Graham’s new single “Collapses To Zero”. Beginning with soft acoustic strumming before introducing dreamy steel guitar, the song is a an existential meditation that finds its singer wading through a sea of reverb that washes over the listener with a sense of warmth. Graham, who showcases both his folk singer side and his more soulful, high octave vocals with far out harmonies, brings to mind the quieter side of Harry Nilsson with an indie rock sensibility.
Graham describes the song and its process in his own words:
“This is one of those ‘big question’ songs. Which is a bit ironic, in that I’m not someone who typically spends a lot of time gazing into the existential abyss in real life. But it’s good lyrical fodder, I suppose. My main memory of this song is that it was the first thing we recorded for ‘Out of the Sea.’ It was the first time this group of musicians played together, and I just remember how exhilarating it was for us all to come in for that first playback and hear all those great sounds swimming around in a glorious pool of plate reverb. None of the players knew each other and we had never played the songs before, so that was a great moment of ‘yes, I think this is going to work.’”
LISTEN:
For more music and info visit grahamnorwoodmusic.com.
