“She's the moon in the sky / She's the turning of the tide / She's the salt in the water, the horizon line.” David Borné's “Color of the Rain” is an ode to the driving force behind it all—inspired by the idea that rain itself is colored by whatever surrounds it.
GENESIS, out September 22, produced by Jarrad K (Ruston Kelly, Lucie Silvas, Elohim) and engineered by Grammy winner Gena Johnson (John Prine, Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton), is about healing. It's about finding the courage to work though what may be holding you back. It's about starting over. Out September 22, the album finds the singer-songwriter journeying down a path: death, rebirth, and beginning again.
“Healing and growth is not a straight line, so the album plays a lot off the notion that joy and suffering, light and dark, learning and unlearning all take each other."
The album also features an impressive group of supporting musicians including a duet with Bre Kennedy, another with Hadley Kennary, Chris Powell (Brandi Carlile, The Highwomen, Sturgill Simpson) on drums, Lydia Luce on strings, Liana Alpino on harp, and background vocals from John Davidson and Jacob Bryant (The Brummies).
Recently released “Stardust" considers the thought that there's no such thing as a coincidence; the song follows the release of both “Disembodied Voices," an exercise in letting go of fear, and “I Like The Idea,” an inclusive, upbeat jaunt celebrating life's goodness: that love is all around us and that “hope is a chameleon that can blend in with the ceiling, but it's never truly lost." It's a song Borné calls his “gravestone song” because it so closely recounts what's important to him.
Borné is affectionately known by his friends as somewhat of a guru—albeit an approachable one—so of course, of course, there was a profound moment and an otherworldy-infused symbol that led to the making of his new album: two weeks before he was set to record his dream project, the investor Borné had lined up disappeared.
“It's a privileged problem, you know, in the grand scheme of things, to not be able to make this record,” he says. "It's not the worst thing in the world compared to what so many people go through. But I just kept looking for a sign that I was doing the right thing. Then I was walking in the woods by my house, and a butterfly literally flew into my forehead.”
“I put together a GoFundMe and just said, 'y'all, I need your help: if you've ever watched me play, it's all led to this moment, this record.' So, I put it up, and then within 24 hours, it was at $25,000,” he says.
“There's a mystery in the middle of the hole in your chest, a riddle you're dying to solve. Pay attention, listen, the thing you're missing has been with you all along,” he says in “Clarity,” a line that summarizes the soul-searching on GENESIS well. If there's a lesson to be learned in the lines of GENESIS, it may just be that leaning into these unknowable forces can yield an experience beyond what you might ever have expected.
GENESIS Track Listing:
B4
Leave The Light On
Hermano
Color of the Rain
Clarity (feat. Bre Kennedy)
Disembodied Voices
I Like The Idea
Heaven, Eventually
Deja Vu
I Became
Silence in the Sound (feat. Hadley Kennary)
Stardust
Singing Machine, Microphone
