Description
Beloved is the fifth full-length studio album by the American singer and songwriter Robert Deeble, PledgeMusic-funded and officially released on Mind Bomb Music in March 2018 . The album was produced by Robert Deeble with Graig Markel. String arrangement by Ric Hordinski of Over the Rhine fame. Among the special guests featured on the album are Jen Wood (The Postal Service), Graig Markel, Tomo Nakayama (Grand Hallway), Josh Golden (Pedro the Lion/Damien Jurado), Tony Green & Antoine Arvizu (from Earthside Down), and Kris Rosentrater
Beloved is a album about Robert Deeble’s daughter and the memoir of becoming her adoptive father: “It documents an amazing period of my life. Beloved is the meaning of my daughter’s name and this is a memoire of becoming her father. This album is inspired by a beautiful backstory. Following my last release (Heart Like Feathers) my wife and I became foster parents to a 3-day old baby girl. Over the next four years went from fostering, to God parents, to an open adoption – the emotions that resulted from that experience are the inspiration for these compositions.”
Many of the artists who use PledgeMusic are under the radar, connecting with a small-ish audience to create personal works that probably wouldn’t thrive in the mainstream, but that hit the spot for the people who pony up. Robert Deeble certainly fits that bill. I discovered Deeble at AudioFeed a couple years ago – he played a set on his own, and then one with Choir drummer Steve Hindalong. He’s an unconventional guitar player who writes in an ambient folk style – stripped back yet lush, sparse and airy yet as full as it needs to be. He’s been making records since the late ‘90s, but I jumped aboard with 2013’s delightful Heart Like Feathers.
Beloved is Deeble’s first album since then. A hundred forty-nine of us pledged to bring it to life, and it’s everything I hoped it would be. Beloved is a deeply intimate record, telling the story of his journey as a new father, first fostering his daughter and then fully adopting her. As you might guess, it’s a very pretty set of songs, led by Deeble’s whisper of a voice. It opens with a sweet arrangement of «You Are My Sunshine», and moves in that vein from there. It’s 42 minutes of a father’s love, which he felt from the first moment he met her (as he details in «Coal Miner»), and it’s guaranteed to leave you with a warm glow.
Deeble enlisted a pretty large number of collaborators for this record, including singers and string players, but he’s retained that open, airy feel of his previous work. «Uncertain» and «Coal Miner» are bigger tunes, the latter ending with a singalong refrain of “it’s gonna be all right” that might be the most massive thing Deeble’s ever done. But still, this feels small and intimate, like reading his diary. The fragile lullaby «To Find You» details his reunion with his daughter after a year apart (she was in the care of her birth mother), determined to come to some arrangement that would protect this little girl he had come to love. “And I’ll take all I can get to give all I can for you,” he sings, and you know he means it.
«Even Now» crackles, even though the instruments in it are barely moving. Somehow the drums on Deeble’s records tend to snap in a way few others I’ve heard manage, especially when the rest of the instrumentation is so subtle. It’s a song of sorrow, but as he says, sorrow that bonded him and his wife together with his daughter’s birth parents, so there is hope.
The final few songs of Beloved are guaranteed to move you. The title track relates the night he and his wife picked up their daughter and drove home as a family for the first time: “And we’ve cried, and we’ve cried for such a long time, and it feels like for the first time it’s going to be all right…” «Sleep» is truly lovely – you can imagine him rocking his baby girl back and forth as you listen – and the untitled interlude uses her actual voice, singing “doo doo doo” along with a fun beat. The final track, «Recovery», is a sweet instrumental, a loving and lovely way to end.
Without AudioFeed, I don’t know that I would ever have found Robert Deeble. Without PledgeMusic, I don’t know if Beloved would have been made. My musical life would have been poorer for it. I’m enamored with this little record, this love letter in song. In a world that makes me want to hang my head daily, it’s a joy to have something this precious, this full of heart. Beloved makes me want to keep going. I’m glad it exists. [Andre Salles, Tuesday Morning 3 a.m., November 2017]
> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/beloved/1353152308)
CD tracklist:
01. Sunshine – 2:43
02. Uncertain – 4:42
03. Coal Miner – 5:51
04. To Find You – 4:35
05. Even Now – 5:38
06. Reprise – 2:23
07. The Mulberry Bird – 3:57
08. Beloved – 3:57
09. Sleep – 3:02
10. (…) the Ballad of Little Miss M – 1:54
11. Recovery (instrumental) – 3:03
Note: Simultaneously released on 12-inch vinyl LP and CD. A percentage of the proceeds of the PledgeMusic campaign will be donated to Treehouse to help foster children and their families. 25% of any money raised after the goal is reached will go to Treehouse. Available at Bandcamp: http://store.robertdeeble.com/album/beloved
“Even Now” (MUSIC VIDEO)
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