SONG PREMIERE: Layperson Crafts Urgent and Energetic Americana-rock on “Black Pool”

Grief has the power to crack us wide open, a shift so great it can change the very air we breathe, the very person we believe ourselves to be. On his latest record Massive Leaning, Julian Morris, the songwriter behind Portland, OR’s Layperson, has found a way to tell that story. In the aftermath of the most significant break-up of his life, Morris examines his newly unrecognizable world with an unflinching, yet patient eye, carrying us from the oblivion of sorrow to an eventual spiritual rebirth and an emergence of a new path forward. It is this journey that allows Massive Leaning to transcend the genre of the “break-up” album, to give careful attention not only to grief but also to the sheer wonder that can begin to fill the space left by what we have lost.

“Loneliness is not necessarily joyless. It’s part of what makes us connected to other people. We get lonely in the way we get hungry or thirsty.” Morris says of the four years he spent working on the record, the bulk of which he wrote and recorded from home. It is perhaps this perspective that allows the songs of Massive Leaning to feel almost like comfortable companions to sorrow. The music is open and effortless, with warm arrangements of guitars, keys, and pedal steel coupled with Morris’s easy, melodic delivery that in moments recall Sam Evian or even Elliott Smith. In this way, grief becomes almost familiar, if not palatable, and eventually moves Morris to allow his own spiritual practice to bloom. “I think it was not a mistake that life presented me with those experiences,” he says.

If the end is to have a beginning, it perhaps lies with “Black Pool,” a standout track on the new album. Glide is excited to premiere this raw expression of the shock that comes from the understanding that the end has arrived and we are powerless to stop it. Hitting out of the gate with the kind of airy Americana-meets-indie-rock that brings to mind artists like Tom Petty, Lord Huron, and The Shins, this tune is insanely infectious as it finds its songwriter taking a dive into oblivion while he explores his layers of heartbreak with carefully delivered truths. Craft pop hooks dance around twangy pedal steel and rich harmonies to make for a song that lingers long after listening and always makes for a proper head-bobber.

Julian Morris describes the inspiration behind the tune::

This song was originally the title track for the record. When I started working on it in the fall of 2019, I was really heartbroken. “Black Pool” was written in one sitting, it’s just a super raw song about not believing your current circumstances could be real. I wasn’t capable of overthinking this song, it’s more like a gut punch. It’s also about surrender. Or maybe the step right before surrender. The “Oh fuck! There’s no way out of this?!” It’s the kind of information that leaves your brain at the edge of what it can conceive. At the time for me that was the loss of intimacy with another person. It sounds really dramatic in retrospect, but at the time I felt so intertwined with this person I literally couldn’t imagine them not choosing our relationship. I thought we were rekindling our connection, and they were like, “no, I don’t choose that.” This stuff feels like tectonic plates shifting when it happens, the song has that energy to it. I don’t feel that way anymore, but I know I will again about something else. When I was writing this record it really felt like I was writing the songs I needed to hear. I wanted to hear grief described how I was feeling it. I wanted to hear longing and growth how I was experiencing it. I would play the songs back and feel a lot of satisfaction, just hearing the emotion played back to me. It was comforting. It’s all we have sometimes. I’m really grateful to have songwriting because of that.

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