Heartbreaking Bravery

Heartbreaking Bravery recently went offline but all facets of the site are back to being fully operational. Apologies for any inconveniences. All posts that were slated to run during that brief hiatus will appear with this note.

One of the bands that Heartbreaking Bravery was built to celebrate was Young Jesus. Ever since Home, the band’s been consistently releasing some of the best material of any year they put something out. The band’s leader, John Rossiter (pictured left), has been kind enough to provide this site with a whole array of material for premieres and publishing, including a piece for the last edition of A Year’s Worth of Memories. Rossiter’s graciously returning for this year’s edition with a piece examining some moments on the bands tours and revelations gleaned from introspection. Read it below.

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Too many thoughts for this year. Too too many. I don’t even know where to begin and I think that’s part of the point– part of this dark and swirling and sordid winter of a U.S. soul. There’s no single laser-focus problem or answer (I know this is nothing new but I don’t know what else to write).

I wanna write to you like I know you. Maybe we’ve played the same houses, seen the same bands, read the same books. And still you are DISTANT— on some computer or phone (like me right now). There are strands here though, the tiniest bridges or strings. Cobwebs connecting us in some real tenuous ways. Tenuous but they’re there. Together in the no-answer?

This year was, like the last few years, full of touring, recording, work. We played an exhausted two hour improv set in Yorkville, IL where (looking back on it) we probably sounded something like Phish meets Neu!. I got a fever in Houston and missed out on Fuddruckers. Slept on a ranch with ten huskies and a few horse in the middle of a Dallas thunderstorm. Time’s gone gauzy and Like Bill Callahan said in “Jim Cain“, “I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again. Something too big to be seen was passing over and over me.”

There was a line from a tune we released this year, where it culminates in me yelling, “I am ashamed to believe in myself!” The more I think about it, the more the whole idea changes. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether I believe in myself. I’ve come to believe in the constant flux construction of it all– the distance and intimacy between me, Eric, Kern, Marcel (the band)– our families, our friends, people at shows– the daily strange process of living.

I’m trying to grant it a certain vigilance and respect and thought. Consideration of space (for people, for things). I don’t know you but I believe in this daily effort, the slow strengthening of our tiny strings. There are Too-Big-Things passing over us. We’ll be around. I’m not sure what kinda model to follow, how our music should be released, at what level our actions need to speak of resistance and care. But I wanna talk about it and hear what you think.