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.

Last year, Patio‘s Lindsey-Paige McCloy penned a beautiful, multilayered piece that reflected on some key moments from 2015. For 2016, the emerging musician asked to take a slightly different approach but circled back to a very specific topic. While Patio made another appearance on a year-end list, another Paige-McCloy project — Catbus — found themselves in the Best Songs. Below, Paige-McCloy pays tribute to Catbus band member Phyllis Ophelia in memorable fashion.

++

For the second year in a row I’m turning in a down-to-the-wire submission some distance into the following year. Steven somehow agreed to let me send in a demo instead of writing down a reflection using words because I can barely string together a sentence, so I put my amp in my bathtub to see what would happen and then I sat in it for a couple of hours with my Bobkat and the Tascam four track I bought from a man in San Francisco on the internet in October and I made this thing.

This is a lyrically-inaccurate, tape-hiss-ridden version of one of my favorite songs released in 2016 – “Saint Hangover” by Phyllis Ophelia – and really you should listen to the version from Phyllis’s EP Analemma I instead. If for some reason you listened to that song and wondered what it would sound like if it were played by a different person in a freezing cold cast iron bathtub, sporadically double-tracked to tape, run unmixed through a $20 Target boombox, and then recorded to an iPhone voice memo, your wildest dreams have come true.

Sorry to Phyllis for getting the lyrics all wrong and to my roommate Patrick who had to drag my amp out of said freezing cast iron bathtub to shower at 6:30am on Sunday morning because I forgot he had to work.