Peer Validated

It seems a little bit bandwagon to tout an album that has been in Paste, but I knew it first, so this is my call for cred. Doug’s Burr’s On Promenade was released last year by a small label in California, Velvet Blue Music. VBM is sort of my go to label. Because of gems like the initial release of Richard Swift’s The Novelist, Frank Lenz’s Conquest Slaughter, and LN’s Novel, when adequately financed, I will buy most anything they do. At this point it is safe to mention On Promenade in the same breath as any of the amazing albums put out by this definitionally independent label. Also, I obscenity in the milk of cred.
Doug Burr is what country music should be. He should be headlining Country Jam/Fest with Okkervil River, Songs:Ohia, Sixteen Horsepower, and Willie Nelson. Unfortunately, popular country and western music has become a purgatorial reflection of top forty radio pop, embracing all of the inherent flaws and mediocrity of music that has current mass appeal. There isn’t really a profitable place for songs of this sort. Songs that are important. For shame.
Burr’s writing can be both ominous and hopeful. Vivid descriptions of dreams and letters from painters are paired with lush instrumentation atypical of the sometimes austere alt-country genre. The album has a well crafted ebb and flow of tempo and mood making repeat listens genuinely enjoyable.
‘How Can The Lark (My Dear Theo)’ is presented as a letter from an aforementioned painter to his brother, a correspondence of love and pain and compulsion. The guitar swell at the end of the first verse may be my favorite moment in any of his songs, so pay attention. The song will leave you, the listener, hanging a bit as it fades absolutely perfectly into the next song. You’ll have to buy it or come over to my house to hear it in context. Open invite.

Doug Burr - How Can The Lark (My Dear Theo)