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"Floor It" OUT NOW! 
Listen here:
https://bearhands.lnk.to/FloorIt

In 2004, Marc Broussard, then a precocious 22-year-old singer/songwriter, released his major-label debut; he called it Carencro, after the Louisiana town where he was born and raised, and its thematic centerpiece was a hickory-smoked slab of Bayou soul called “Home.” That album and the three that followed revealed Broussard as an old-school Southern soul singer blessed with a rarefied gift and innate stylistic and emotional authenticity, causing the L.A. Times to rave, “The guy can really sing, with power, nuance and class. Anybody got a phone book? I’d listen to him hum a few pages.” Those records also evidenced Broussard’s maturation into a songwriter of uncommon eloquence, fashioning the indigenous idioms of his native region into compelling personal testimony.   

Now, a decade after his critical breakthrough, Broussard has come full circle with A LIFE WORTH LIVING his sixth studio album, a celebration of what home means to him, starting with his wife and kids, the street he’s lived on his entire life, surrounded by loved ones, and all the minutiae of everyday life that he has come to treasure. 

“Home definitely has a lot to do with this album,” he confirms. “But family has a lot to do with it as well, and those two go hand in hand. The infrastructure of family is really important, especially when you have four kids. Luckily I’ve got family that I’ve been able to lean on throughout all these years. Then,on top of it all, this place is just special. There’s a different way of living, a different way of communicating and a different way of celebrating life here that is infectious. And once you realize it, you never want to leave.”

Broussard signals his intentions with the cover portrait, which pictures him with his wife and kids sitting on the steps of a neighbor’s house, instruments in hand, persuasively conveying the notion that the family that plays together stays together. That touching photograph, which recalls Norman Rockwell’s heartwarming images of home and hearth, leads the listener into a song cycle that brings those traditional American values to vivid life, a linked series of ballads and deep-gut soul-rockers with revealing titles like “Edge of Heaven,” “Another Day,” “Weight of the World,” “Perfect to Me” and “Shine.” These songs, some intimate and others churning with intensity, like the kickass blues-rockers “Dyin’ Man” and “Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry,” chart the full range of concerns and emotions of a husband, father and provider as he experiences the joys and sorrows of existence. 

“Whether it’s because I’m older and a little more perceptive, or whether it was just the right time, I find myself with a set of songs that really means the world to me,” Broussard says with pride. “The lion’s share of the material on this record is extremely personal. There are decades of stories behind a single line in any of these songs. In that way alone, it’s vastly different than anything I’ve done before. There was much more attention to detail; I feel like I’ve become a more focused writer.”

From the charged metaphor of the opening track and lead single “Hurricane Heart” to the closing existential lament “I’ll never Know,” Broussard gets really close to the bone on this record—so close, in fact, that there seems to be no distance between himself and these songs, each of them drawn from the very fabric of his life; it’s as if they’re being transmitted from his heart and soul directly to the listener. That’s particularly true of the poignant title piece. 

“It was a rare occurrence to have a song that just kind of wrote itself,” Broussard says of “A Life Worth Living.” “It felt like I was the conduit more than the writer, that I received this thing. It happened right after the passing of my grandmother. She was sick, and she decided not to fight the cancer, which is indicative of her style—she lived by her own rules. My mother’s mother was the matriarch of this wonderful, massive family. Hurricane Isaac was bearing down on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana at the same time that she was passing away, and because it was such a sudden thing—we found out she had cancer and three weeks later she was gone—we were all left speechless. I felt like someone needed to say something and luckily the whole thing laid itself out in front of me. 

“That’s one of two songs on this record that came to me this way,” Broussard continues. “The other one is ‘Give ’Em Hell.’ It’s about a friend of mine, Squirrel we called him, who was the head of the English department at a Jesuit high school in New Orleans. This guy was a brilliant writer, and one of my favorite people of all time. Squirrel passed away suddenly from a heart condition last April, and that led to another song that just hit me. I sat right up in bed and heard the first line. 

“My grandmother passed away at the end of the summer of 2012, and Squirrel passed away in the spring of last year, so those two songs buttressed the entire writing process for this record,” he notes. “I felt both my grandmother and Squirrel’s presence coaxing me through every line, through every tear that rolled down my face as I wrote. Both were extremely emotional to write because I knew how gut-wrenching every line was going to be. So surrendering to the process was very difficult, but incredibly cathartic in the end.” 

The album’s other linchpin song is “Honesty,” which, like “A Life Worth Living” and “Give ’Em Hell,” began with an epiphany. “‘Honesty’ was born out of an experience I had listening to a song called ‘Don’t Tell All My Friends About Me,’ by a brilliant guy named Blake Mills,” Broussard recalls. “That song had a profound effect on me in that it was so brutally honest it couldn’t be denied. For a long, long time, I’ve avoided writing about the darker side of relationships and love for fear of offending my wife’s sensibilities. But after I heard that song, I said to myself, ‘I can’t do that anymore. I’m not gonna allow myself to be stifled; I need to be able to write whatever I’m feeling.” So I had a talk with my wife and let her know that none of this stuff was really that personal, and all she needed to do was focus on how we are to each other. Then I proceeded to open myself up. So ‘Honesty’ is really the quintessence of this new spirit in my writing. 

A LIFE WORTH LIVING marks Broussard’s return to Vanguard, which released 2007’s SOS: Save Our Soul, his scintillating album of covers of Southern soul classics.

“Luckily, I’m with a company that recognizes opportunities and is nimble and agile enough to make moves on it when they present themselves,” says Broussard. “All of the things that I needed to happen for me to feel confident about this project have come together. It’s put me in a really good head space. I’m really looking forward to the future, and there’s no end in sight, that’s the thing. We’ve got ideas that are fresh, and a team that’s really excited about implementing those ideas. I’m poised for some big things, hopefully, right here.”

With that, Broussard eases himself back into the unhurried rhythm of life in Carencro. The next order of business: dropping off a cookie cake baked by his wife to his daughter’s first-grade class at the neighborhood elementary school.

https://phantogram.komi.io/

Fall In Love Again (Desmond Remix) Out Now
Move In Silence feat. Big Boi Out Now

Sparked by a color or song that recalls the most joyful and tragic moments in your life, a sense memory vaults you into the distant past. These subtle triggers remind us that memory isn’t confined to the mind; it lives in the body, too. Phantogram’s fifth album, Memory of a Day, captures that disorienting sense of time travel. “We put these songs together as a capsule, thinking about how a certain sound or melody can bring you back instantly to a memory of a day,” Phantogram says. 

While they were recording, the duo fixated on life calendars, a gridded sheet in which each unit represents a single week of a person’s life on the planet. As you fill in the grid, you witness the progression of your life in stark terms. The older you get, the darker the grid becomes, reminding you of how much time you have lived, and how little you may have left. “It’s this exploded view,” Phantogram says. “Like an image of Earth from a distance.” The life calendar is both morbid and nostalgic, a physical representation of our ephemeral time on Earth. 

“Days are only numbers,” Sarah Barthel sings on the chorus of “Come Alive.” That lyric became a north star for the duo as they set forth to make Memory of a Day. At once heavy and ebullient, “Come Alive” distills the lasting impact Phantogram has made on popular culture. Since their 2010 debut, Eyelid Movies, Phantogram has been comparable to no one, futurists who still manage to stay ahead of the curve more than a decade into their career. Their genre-bending approach to pop has led them to work with everyone, from Big Boi, with whom they founded Big Grams, to Subtronics, Future Islands, Deftones, the Flaming Lips, Tom Morello, and Miley Cyrus, to name just a few. A festival staple across the globe, Phantogram has also toured with Queens of the Stone Age, Arcade Fire, the XX, and many more. “We’ve always been proud of that: not being afraid of the experimental.”

Though their music has always been future-facing, to make Memory of a Day, Phantogram looked back. “Recording this album, it felt like how it did when we first started making music together,” Phantogram says. Alongside special collaborators like Mikky Ekko and Dan Wilson, Phantogram was joined in the studio by producer John Hill, who helmed Phantogram’s second album, Voices. The duo experimented in the studio and indulged in the music that brought them together in the beginning, artists such as J Dilla, Prince, Slowdive, and so much more. They reference new wave acts like the Talking Heads, ESG, and Liquid Liquid as influences on the percussive punk track “Feedback Invisible,” which is followed by the wistful burst of color “Attaway.” It’s a shoegaze song so sumptuous “you can almost see the grain in the guitar sounds.” 

Phantogram think in images when they write, drawing on scenes from films that linger with them years on. “Ever since Eyelid Movies, our work has been visually driven,” Phantogram says. In the video for the fuzzed-out waltz “All a Mystery,” snippets of human lives coalesce into a montage of experience. “Erase all the tapes in my mind/ Throw them all away,” Barthel sings, accompanied by a bittersweet swell of synths. “Turn back the tables of time/ Let all those memories die.” A swirl of memories, both triumphant and tragic, surface on Memory of a Day. “Come Alive” was written after Barthel experienced a transformative live show on her own, while the title track recounts the moment Josh Carter had to put his dog down. “It’s what you wanted, but couldn’t say,” he sings. “I’m not afraid of dying or what it feels like”

The album’s penultimate track, “Happy Again,” is a thrumming, bass-heavy rock song with a chorus that sounds like a wave crashing against the sand. “Another empty summer sunset/ Feeling homesick,” Barthel sings ahead of the bridge, her voice catching on the breezy, luminous production. “Can you believe this is your life?” It’s a moment of realization Phantogram compares to the dour scene in Forrest Gump, where Lieutenant Dan, “mega depressed and drunk,” throws a bummer New Year’s Eve party. Still, the song ends with an enlivening mantra. “I can be happy again,” Barthel repeats as guitars careen and crash. If days are only numbers, then how else can a person measure a life? On “Ashes,” the answer seems to be in moments of resilience. Based on the adage “you came into this world alone and you’ll leave it alone,” the throbbing production infused with elements of trip hop, shoegaze and indie accompanies Barthel as she reminds the listener: “Ashes rise, ashes rise.”

When they penned the lyrics, Phantogram thought of the mythical phoenix spreading its wings after catastrophe to take flight. The vulnerable, even despairing moments on Memory of a Day are stark, but they’re buoyed by a relentless optimism that has driven this project from the outset. In the Los Angeles studio where they recorded Memory of a Day, Phantogram often marveled at the distance they’ve come, both physically and spiritually, since they first started making music together in a barn in Upstate New York. “Tomorrow never knows,” Barthel nods to the Beatles on “Come Alive.” The accumulation of days together tell a story bigger than any finite lifetime, and Phantogram’s life calendar is only a fraction full.

Bree Bendall is following