SONG PREMIERE: Eliot Bronson Searches for Healing on Breezy Americana Tune “Good For You”

Over the course of five albums, indie folksinger Eliot Bronson has created his own brand of acclaimed Americana. He’s an award winner. A road warrior. An internationally-renowned musician with a voice that swoons and sweeps, making fans out of everyone from his hometown newspaper, The Baltimore Sun — who championed Bronson from the very start, hailing him as “a folk singing wunderkind” back when he was still playing local coffeeshops — to Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb, whose work on 2014’s Eliot Bronson and 2017’s James placed Bronson on the same client roster as Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, and other heartfelt songwriters. 

Bronson turns a new page with Empty Spaces, which will be released on July 24th. Written during a period of tumult — including the breakup of a 10-year relationship, the end of an engagement, and a move from his adopted home of Atlanta to his current headquarters in Nashville — it’s an album about loss, redemption, the places we leave, and the homes we make for ourselves. More importantly, it’s an album about starting again. Like the soundtrack to a rainy day whose skies steadily give way to sunshine, the music itself is gorgeous and moodily atmospheric, splashed with watercolor streaks of electric guitar, vocal harmonies, strings, Mellotron, and Bronson’s sharpest songwriting to date.

Ever since his teenage years in working-class Baltimore, music has been a source of therapy for Bronson. Back then, he felt like a prisoner in his own home — a home filled with volatility and unpredictability, overseen by parents whose identities were equally (and, perhaps, paradoxically) informed by the Church and 1960s counterculture. Outside the front door loomed the Pentecostal Church where his father and grandfather once preached to  congregants who spoke in tongues. It was an odd refuge for a child, and Bronson found his own sort of escape in his father’s record collection, drawn to LPs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and the trailblazing blues duo of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. Inspired, he began writing his own music as a teenager, eventually those songwriting skills into a career — and, with it, a ticket out of town. 

Relocating to Atlanta, he found a regional audience as a member of popular folk-rock duo The Brilliant Inventions and became a regular performer at Eddie’s Attic, where acts like John Mayer and the Indigo Girls once honed their own craft. His subsequent solo career attracted even more attention, not to mention high-profile awards like a first-place finish in the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest. When a longtime relationship with his fiancé came to a halt, though, Bronson found himself leaning upon songwriting once again — not only for a living, but also for personal stability. 

“I began writing the kind of songs I needed to hear,” he explains. “Empty Spaces was the best healing work I could’ve ever done. I had a weird, challenging childhood, and I originally turned to music because I didn’t have anywhere else to go in the house, physically. I made my own little world that made me feel safe and understood. This time, I really needed to find that space again and come full-circle. I made this record for the same reason that I wrote my first song. It wasn’t for anybody else; it was for me. Hearing the right words at the right moment can be the most magical elixir you can possibly take. It can heal you.”

To fully heal, though, Bronson needed to make some changes. He left Atlanta and moved to Nashville. He made the conscious decision to escape the shadow of his influences, too, writing a new batch of songs that sounded not like Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, or Tom Waits, but like Eliot Bronson. He sank more time into his daily mediation practice, allowing creativity to enter his life in waves. And after recording his two previous albums with renowned producer Dave Cobb, he also decided to co-produce the new record with longtime bandmate Will Robertson, setting up in Robertson’s basement studio and tracking Empty Spaces‘ 10 songs in a series of live, full-band performances. The result? An album that’s emotive, pensive, melancholy, and wholly moving. This isn’t just a record about empty spaces, after all. It’s a record about the new discoveries that can fill that emptiness. 

Today Glide is excited to premiere Bronson’s new single “Good For You,” a breezy, beautiful track that finds him stacks his voice into layers of harmony as he pines for a distant lover who’s moved across the country. Set to a twangy Americana soundtrack, Bronson taps into some of his finest crooning with a touch of Chris Isaak and a touch of Jason Isbell. Even though this is a song that was inspired by anger, there is a sense of soothing calm that comes across in the mellow music and Bronson’s swooning vocals. He has long been a majorly underrated artist, but this song serves as a reminder of the high level of quality Bronson possesses in his songwriting craftsmanship, singing and overall musicality. It’s a damn shame for any artist that has been sidelined due to the pandemic that has virtually shut down the live music industry, but “Good For You” signals loud and clear that Bronson is an artist ready to be playing big stages in front of diehard fans.  

Bronson shares his thoughts on the inspiration behind the song:

“You could look at Empty Spaces a ‘Stages of Grief’ album. I guess I was still pretty angry when I wrote ‘Good for You.’

My favorite Buddhist teacher says ‘where there’s anger, there’s usually repressed sadness, and where there’s sadness, there’s usually repressed anger.’ He would often give the advice: try to feel both emotions at the same time.

There’s certainly a good amount of “how could you do this to me” in there, but there’s also ‘you can’t see yourself right now,’ and ‘you’re making a mistake.’

A big part of healing was allowing myself to write whatever I needed to hear, without judgement. There were things I just had to say out loud. Singing them out loud was better than therapy.”

LISTEN:

Empty Spaces will be released on July 24th. For more music and info visit eliotbronson.com.

Photo credit: Jenna Shea Mobley

Related Content

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter