Brody Price
Win A Trip To Palm Springs!
October 28, 2022
(Niles City Records)
PHOTO CREDIT: CV Fields
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ALBUM COVER
Spanning more than 3 years of rehearsal and writing, Brody Price’s new album Win a Trip to Palm Springs! is a dark oasis of gentle brutality and well-thought-out chaos. Price himself refers to WATTPS!, with an almost patented tongue-in-cheek wisdom, as “Doom Country.” The songs here are as devastating as they are beautiful, embracing Price’s evolutionary path into becoming a human with a license to be angry, hopeful, and fully himself.
"I grew up in a really sheltered conservative household and dealt with some pretty nasty mental health issues my whole life,” Price reveals. “I had never really stood up for myself or done anything just because I wanted to. In my early twenties, I started working in Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert researching these big 70 million-year-old magma bodies. Being out there for the first time was so cathartic. I couldn't believe that I was this kid from south Texas that had ended up working with folks from all over the world in one of the most other-worldly places I'd ever seen — just because I wanted to. Not because it was going to make my parents happy or make a lot of money. I just went because I wanted to learn.”
Vacillating between moments of perfect folk gentility, weighty sludge metal, noise rock mayhem and various other genre dalliances, WATTPS! dodges any pigeon-holed section of the record store. Born out of Price’s own internal tension, and coupled with a growth mindset sharpened by therapy, this album studies the macro and micro of loss, identity, ache, and want. But for Price, studying is not enough. This album is equal parts cutting & cathartic, or as Price puts it: these songs “find the knot and try to get it to come loose.” Honest joy shares a table with unsterilized darkness in WATTPS! and the result is an impressive and authentic debut album.
Recorded in 6 cities across 3 states, WATTPS! is the sonic lovechild of Brody Price and long-time friend and collaborator Marshall Pruitt. “We made everything together,” Price says. “This album is so special because instead of sounding like an impersonation of someone else, it sounds like me and my friends.” Case in point, laced throughout the track list you’ll find vocal and instrumental appearances by Price’s heroes and pals like John Paul White (The Civil Wars), Robert Ellis, Will Johnson (Centro-matic), and Andy Baxter (Penny & Sparrow). Making this record over the chaotic quarantine years afforded Price what he called “the one place where I could process what was happening in the world.”
From the raucous “Dying When I Met You” (the album’s first foyer into Dinosaur Jr. cacophony), to the saloon-drunk “Love I Hope You Stay” (where we see Price painted in a beautiful shade of John Prine blue) and all the way to the final track “Waltz” (where Price claims that “all of the flavors of the record can be found in one place”) this album stuns and heals.
“When I was working in Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert, I was so far away from my ‘old life’ and the expectations of other people,” says Price. “Away from the whole ‘you've gotta dress like this, behave like this, vote like this, pray like this.’ It was just totally freeing. The more time I spent out there the more I realized that the same sense of freedom and solitude that attracts me to that region attracts so many other folks. I was in the nearby Palm Springs area recently and it just has this energy where everyone feels like they can let loose and be themselves. My hope is that this record could be that place for folks: rest, escape, joy, mourning... basically a place that can morph into whatever you need at the given time."
For Price, Win a Trip to Palm Springs! is the embodiment of feeling at home in his own emotional and musical skin. For us as listeners, if we truly lean in, we’ll see that we’ve been invited on the same vacation.
For more information, please contact:
Jake Lanier
jake@luckybirdmedia.com