Various Artists — Brian Dolphin & You, Volume 1 (Self-Released)
Brian Dolphin is a folk musician and musicologist best known for his role in Doran, the four-piece alt-folk ensemble that touches on both myth and history. His Brian Dolphin & You project is more grounded and contemporary, bringing together friends and fellow musicians for six-hour recording sessions, then releasing the results, two per month, via the Brian Dolphin bandcamp page. This compilation collects 31 of these songs, divided evenly between Dolphin’s own material and that of his guests, a “best of” compilation of sorts.
Dolphin himself has a relaxed and easy way of delivering a song. His drawled tenor will remind you of Big Thief’s Buck Curran in the way it bends and dips and enlivens otherwise spare and minimal songs. Still he’s best when intermingled with the other artists he’s invited, as on the rhythmic but delicate string-band stomp “Walked Into You” or the swirling fiddle-embellished swagger of “Old Ford.”
The guest artists track are, in some ways, more interesting, since they range from metal-infused ghostly folk (Milkmother’s “Drink Oil”) to glitchy folktronica (Andrew de Lange’s “Watching Wave”) to Uriel Najera’s quasi-rapped funk groove “Every Day I Walk.”
Some of the songs feel a bit off-the-cuff, perhaps an artifact of the process in which people are encouraged to come up with a song about something before the tape runs out. Marie, the Band’s “Night Driving,” for instance, is a charming but slight meditation on the scariness of driving in the dark, while April Wilson’s lushly harmonized “What Have I Done” feels like a goof, not a song. Yet there’s some beautiful stuff in here, including the very last track Pooja Prema’s cooing, hypnotic “Babybird Song,” which will haunt you long after you’ve put the record away.
You have to admire Dolphin and his friends for not waiting around for the muse, but rather making songwriting a regular and disciplined process. It’s proof that if you make the commitment and do the work, the inspiration will come, not always but often enough.
