The New York based singer/songwriter Brady O'Keefe has traveled a pretty long and rough path on his way to making the record he has wanted to make since the ripe old age of sixteen. A native of Massachusetts, O’Keefe moved to Long Island to study the music business and after about two years realized that this was a dead end and he’d likely be better off making music on his own. So he took that route, however in order to stay in proximity of New York City proper he had to share a house with six other friends, a house which was often noisy which made it difficult to find time to record a hushed, folk album. So O”Keefe began a long process of recording his record Violins during the most quiet times he could find which were the wee hours of the morning.
These mornings and their quiet emptiness pervade every note on this little bedroom recording of acoustic folk that falls into the area of the more pop-oriented stylings yet the lyrics tend to deal with the less than ideal aspects of coming of age and realizing that the past cannot be changed and the future still looks a bit bleak, so there one is stuck in the middle of this and trying to make some sort of sense of it all. Violins opens with “Kidding” a field recording of sorts that pairs background acoustic instrumentals with tape hiss and some bits and pieces of vocal cutouts from various odds and ends. It becomes a bit overdone as an opening offering, as well as a closing one. Wasting no more time, O’Keefe slips into the first real song on the record, “Wings” which keeps some of this background noise (perhaps an old television program) and puts his acoustic folk musings to work. The guitar at once draws one in to its dark and melodic realm. One feels the early morning hours during which this was recorded, hears the tiredness, the hushed vocal tones. The tone of folk is given to a bit of alt country twang later on “Where We Lost the Wheels.” After another found-sound instrumental, “The Dirty Hemp” O’Keefe pulls out “Houdini” a slow moving and haunting bit of acoustic folk that eventually builds into some-sort of proto-pop that has its roots in Simon & Garfunkel but for a new generation. One finds here more depth than one usually finds in the coming of age folk artist. It is without a doubt the most magical song on the record. The closer “Por Qué” much like Violins opening track, sounds staged, a required bookend perhaps he thought, needed to give some semblance of order. Violins exhibits a folk musician with immense potential. The ideas one can tell, even though not fully fleshed yet, are there in the musical compositions. With a quieter space and perhaps more time to concentrate, I believe O’Keefe could do amazing things.
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