Dallas-based songwriter Brody Price doesn’t believe in the cliché of the American dream. Yet, like any American—poor or rich, conformist or rebel—it buries him with signifiers and insignias of so-called success. Thus, the narrator ends up a stranger in a strange land, finding the American dream gone wrong somewhere between a dive bar and a highway. There, while killing time and time killing him, a sad smile etches across his shadowy visage, his eyes full of asphalt-darkness. The result isn’t pretty, but Price is brave enough not to avert his gaze.
In 2022, Price released Win a Trip to Palm Springs!, a debut album that straddles between singer-songwriter material and classic country tropes. Although nothing could have prepared you for the sonic onslaught of Leaf Miner’s Daughter, there were hints, as in “Dying When I Met You”, which showed Price’s ability to sing while being waist-deep in the abyss, drowning and flailing, kicking around like a lost cause, until love knocked him over with salvation.
Importantly, too, “Dying When I Met You” was a harbinger of Leaf Miner’s Daughter: squalling and squealing electric guitars like Crazy Horse by way of Drive-By Truckers. Undoubtedly, Leaf Miner’s Daughter is heavier and harder, where searing guitars crash into each other like a highway pile-up. The emotional topography of Leaf Miner’s Daughter is about Brody Price’s real-life struggle with severe alcoholism and his pathway to recovery. However, the album expresses the feelings that led to and were the result of alcoholism rather than being mired in the facts.
The record’s nature reveals itself at the end of the opening track, “Atrophy”. Over guitar distortion, a disc jockey goes on a diatribe. “His clean, moral life,” he intones in disbelief, squeezing each syllable as if it were a person’s neck, as if he cannot believe he once believed in the neoliberal false dream of the good life. “Fuck the callers,” he slams down as if a fist punching a steering wheel, as if, in that moment, he knows he has been taken for a ride all his life.
Above all, though, Brody Price’s nasally keening voice is the real highlight of the record. Yes, it is not a strong or pleasant voice, but in its warbling croons is an emotional truth that renders taste obsolete, showing you the anxiety of the country in one lost man, who seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as if he has somehow bumped into Eddie Cochran in a watering hole, where neither can locate the desolation in their hearts.
Other highlights include “Cell Wall Membrane”, in which the coda includes a Mariachi band, where you feel you are in the 1960s with the Grateful Dead in Mexico City, more stoned than alive, more paranoid than ever. The strongest track is “How It Feels (20th Century Remastered)”, where the quiet verses and loud choruses hit you like a freight train, bolstered by a screaming guitar underpinning a narrator who argues with himself more than to his lover.
Let’s get the elephant out of the room: slacker rock is in vogue. So much so that I wonder if my morning, low-energy mumbling at my regular barista could pass for a song (hipsters stream anything these days). Price’s slacker rock, though, evokes the contemporary figure of Greg Freeman, who brings urgency and energy to the languid genre. Yet Price also carries a deep-seated sadness, an unquenchable ennui echoing Jason Molina‘s weariness.
The compositions of Leaf Miner’s Daughter seem to contain the fate of the world, or at least the fate of the narrator, who, seeing his world collapse, knows there is no escape. Take the opening of “Waste”: the simple acoustic guitar refrain suggests everything you need to know about the songwriter’s state of mind; the music drags him along like his intrusive thoughts. Or what about the melancholic harmonica in “Everything We Have”, à la Bruce Springsteen circa 1978?
There are beautiful sections of music: the postlude of “Beginnings”, where the undulating, scratchy violin coheres with a laid-back rhythm section, not to mention the reverb-laden, crunchy electric guitar in “Losing Fight”, as Price muses on what his 22-year-old self would have thought of his present self.
Despite the pain and strife, Brody Price reaches a place where truth could potentially lead to liberation. Put differently, on Leaf Miner’s Daughter, Price is unafraid to sit with and sustain dark emotions without letting them destroy him or his compositions, because, paradoxically, the darkness will transfigure into the light that will guide him to sobriety.