Andrew Bryant’s new album A Meaningful Connection<\/a><\/em>, is out July 9!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Hamill starts his liner notes for Bob Dylan\u2019s <em>Blood on the Tracks<\/em> this way: \u201cIn the end, the plague touched us all.\u201d I\u2019ll start there, too. Goddamn, we\u2019re all beat up. A wreck of a nation. A wreck of a world. A wreck that has been reassembled with screws missing and busted corners and a bad tilt. What remains\u2014what carried me and carries me\u2014is good art. Andrew Bryant\u2019s voice is one I\u2019m consistently thankful for, and I\u2019m more thankful for it than ever in this time of feeling scraped out and ruined. On this new album,<em> A Meaningful Connection<\/em>, he\u2019s constantly tangling with his wants and needs and fears. He Whitman-wanders through his own wreckage. He\u2019s \u201clooking at the quarrel of the self,\u201d as Hamill said of Dylan. What better way to make sense of things? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI want to be like Christ, but I don\u2019t want to die,\u201d Bryant sings on \u201cFight,\u201d the album\u2019s third track. What comes to mind is Nikos Kazantzakis\u2019s very human Jesus from <em>The Last Temptation of Chris<\/em>t, the \u201cdeep inscrutable mystery\u201d of \u201cnostalgia for God\u201d that opens both \u201clarge wounds and large flowing springs.\u201d <em>A Meaningful Connection<\/em> is not a religious record, but it traffics in the same sort of spiritual anguish. Bryant is always yearning, searching, battling. Loss of faith doesn\u2019t erase the struggle of duality, the conflict of being. <br><br>If the album\u2019s got a thesis, it\u2019s this from \u201cDrink the Pain Away\u201d: \u201cSaying everything is fine when everything feels fucked up is just a lie \/ I guess I never really learned how to let go of the truth for a lie.\u201d Bryant\u2019s more obsessed than ever with the truth and time. He interrogates his past. What\u2019s real? What\u2019s artifice? What\u2019s home? What\u2019s a meaningful connection mean? How do we kill the loneliness? What happens when something we thought was the truth turns out to be a lie? Standout track \u201cBirmingham\u201d spins these questions into a melancholy chronicle of such seeking. Another standout, \u201cReality Winner,\u201d finds Bryant saying, \u201cSo please ya\u2019ll, don\u2019t @ me, \/ I\u2019m trying out this vibe. \/ I don\u2019t have to listen to your truth or your lies.\u201d On \u201cTruth Ain\u2019t Hard to Find,\u201d Bryant tells us that \u201c[the] truth ain\u2019t hard to find \/ It\u2019s a chorus I keep singing in my mind,\u201d and it feels triumphant as hell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The plague came. Other plagues were already here. Yet other plagues have been here forever and will never leave. We struggle on. We look for another song to sing. We drink and we stop drinking. We want and we stop wanting. We find peace in big waves and lose it in fires that tear through our houses and our hearts. \u201cI hear it takes a stronger soul to build a stronger mind,\u201d Bryant says. \u201cLike how a verse is just a verse until you sing it twice.\u201d Here are some songs built to carry you. Here are some songs that play like watching a movie at a drive-in while a hard rain falls. Here is a memory made of gravel. Here is a plan written in ink that bleeds. As Barry Hannah wrote, \u201cLadies and gentleman, it\u2019s all power and light.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> \u2014William Boyle, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Listen to<strong> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/riotactmedia.us1.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=252b821bb623c0544fd0dfc64&id=a1e0d30cc6&e=542d5dfc9f\" target=\"_blank\">“Birmingham,”<\/a> <\/strong>the latest single from Andrew Bryant, available on all digital platforms. The devastating single is the standout track from his new album<strong><em> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/riotactmedia.us1.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=252b821bb623c0544fd0dfc64&id=16ed5fe925&e=542d5dfc9f\" target=\"_blank\">A Meaningful Connection<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"640\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=640%2C640\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-112397\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?w=800&ssl=1 800w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=300%2C300&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=768%2C768&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=50%2C50&ssl=1 50w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=186%2C186&ssl=1 186w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"25\" height=\"16\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg?resize=25%2C16\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-14544\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mississippi multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bryant, of Water Liars, returns with a heartbreaking collection of new songs. Andrew Bryant’s new album A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":112399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7887],"tags":[18905,2731,1546,8304],"class_list":["post-112396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-music","tag-a-meaningful-connection","tag-andrew-bryant","tag-water-liars","tag-william-boyle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/2021-07-07-Andrew-Bryant.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Hamill starts his liner notes for Bob Dylan\u2019s <em>Blood on the Tracks<\/em> this way: \u201cIn the end, the plague touched us all.\u201d I\u2019ll start there, too. Goddamn, we\u2019re all beat up. A wreck of a nation. A wreck of a world. A wreck that has been reassembled with screws missing and busted corners and a bad tilt. What remains\u2014what carried me and carries me\u2014is good art. Andrew Bryant\u2019s voice is one I\u2019m consistently thankful for, and I\u2019m more thankful for it than ever in this time of feeling scraped out and ruined. On this new album,<em> A Meaningful Connection<\/em>, he\u2019s constantly tangling with his wants and needs and fears. He Whitman-wanders through his own wreckage. He\u2019s \u201clooking at the quarrel of the self,\u201d as Hamill said of Dylan. What better way to make sense of things? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI want to be like Christ, but I don\u2019t want to die,\u201d Bryant sings on \u201cFight,\u201d the album\u2019s third track. What comes to mind is Nikos Kazantzakis\u2019s very human Jesus from <em>The Last Temptation of Chris<\/em>t, the \u201cdeep inscrutable mystery\u201d of \u201cnostalgia for God\u201d that opens both \u201clarge wounds and large flowing springs.\u201d <em>A Meaningful Connection<\/em> is not a religious record, but it traffics in the same sort of spiritual anguish. Bryant is always yearning, searching, battling. Loss of faith doesn\u2019t erase the struggle of duality, the conflict of being. <br><br>If the album\u2019s got a thesis, it\u2019s this from \u201cDrink the Pain Away\u201d: \u201cSaying everything is fine when everything feels fucked up is just a lie \/ I guess I never really learned how to let go of the truth for a lie.\u201d Bryant\u2019s more obsessed than ever with the truth and time. He interrogates his past. What\u2019s real? What\u2019s artifice? What\u2019s home? What\u2019s a meaningful connection mean? How do we kill the loneliness? What happens when something we thought was the truth turns out to be a lie? Standout track \u201cBirmingham\u201d spins these questions into a melancholy chronicle of such seeking. Another standout, \u201cReality Winner,\u201d finds Bryant saying, \u201cSo please ya\u2019ll, don\u2019t @ me, \/ I\u2019m trying out this vibe. \/ I don\u2019t have to listen to your truth or your lies.\u201d On \u201cTruth Ain\u2019t Hard to Find,\u201d Bryant tells us that \u201c[the] truth ain\u2019t hard to find \/ It\u2019s a chorus I keep singing in my mind,\u201d and it feels triumphant as hell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The plague came. Other plagues were already here. Yet other plagues have been here forever and will never leave. We struggle on. We look for another song to sing. We drink and we stop drinking. We want and we stop wanting. We find peace in big waves and lose it in fires that tear through our houses and our hearts. \u201cI hear it takes a stronger soul to build a stronger mind,\u201d Bryant says. \u201cLike how a verse is just a verse until you sing it twice.\u201d Here are some songs built to carry you. Here are some songs that play like watching a movie at a drive-in while a hard rain falls. Here is a memory made of gravel. Here is a plan written in ink that bleeds. As Barry Hannah wrote, \u201cLadies and gentleman, it\u2019s all power and light.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> \u2014William Boyle, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Listen to<strong> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/riotactmedia.us1.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=252b821bb623c0544fd0dfc64&id=a1e0d30cc6&e=542d5dfc9f\" target=\"_blank\">“Birmingham,”<\/a> <\/strong>the latest single from Andrew Bryant, available on all digital platforms. The devastating single is the standout track from his new album<strong><em> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/riotactmedia.us1.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=252b821bb623c0544fd0dfc64&id=16ed5fe925&e=542d5dfc9f\" target=\"_blank\">A Meaningful Connection<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"640\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=640%2C640\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-112397\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?w=800&ssl=1 800w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=300%2C300&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=768%2C768&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=50%2C50&ssl=1 50w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Andrew-Bryant-Meaningful-Connection.jpg?resize=186%2C186&ssl=1 186w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"25\" height=\"16\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg?resize=25%2C16\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-14544\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mississippi multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bryant, of Water Liars, returns with a heartbreaking collection of new songs. Andrew Bryant’s new album A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":112399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7887],"tags":[18905,2731,1546,8304],"class_list":["post-112396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-music","tag-a-meaningful-connection","tag-andrew-bryant","tag-water-liars","tag-william-boyle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/2021-07-07-Andrew-Bryant.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}