Ghost Shirt makes fragile peace with death on “Crayon Dragon” – Matter News

Branden Barnett said he grew up as an only child in rural Kentucky and spent a lot of time alone.

end of June Ghost Shirt The singer and songwriter recalled how he started the Super Nintendo game as a child Chrono trigger and spend hours alone immersed in imaginary worlds. The nostalgia these memories evoked was the basis for the song “Chrono Trigger” from Ghost Shirt’s excellent new album. Colored Pencil Dragonwhich picks up Barnett’s memories but adds a long-awaited companion.

“We played Chrono trigger/On your brother’s Super Nintendo,” Barnett sings in chorus with violinist Samantha Schnabel, and the two then move on to describe the tune’s main characters playfully rubbing their socked feet together under a blanket, dreaming of something, anything better.

“It’s kind of a fictional headcanon of what my life could have been like if I hadn’t been alone,” Barnett said via Zoom from his home in Florida, accompanied by Columbus’ Schnabel. “A lot of these records and really a lot of Ghost Shirt songs are what I call ‘Appalachian Trauma Songs.’ … And I love that area. I’ll never say a bad word about it. But Appalachia as a culture is weird and different, and it can be hard to grow up there and not be a football player or a hunter type. If you’re that, it’s great. But if you’re anything else, it’s pretty harsh and invalidating. And a lot of these songs are about the experience of two kids who not destined for Eastern Kentucky.”

Through Colored Pencil Dragonthere’s an attraction between youthful innocence and the harsher realities of adult life, particularly a heightened awareness of mortality. That tragic specter is present even when Barnett sings of “finger-paint-smeared skies” on the tender piano ballad “Basement”—an evocative, childlike description that he soon follows with a line about wishing for something by the light of long-gone stars. And that burden weighs particularly heavily on “Child of Illusion,” a song that Barnett and Schnabel said they still struggle to stomach as they play the album, and which Barnett wrote while reflecting on his own death and the brutal reality that, in death, he would never be able to hold his children again. “Child of Illusion, when my body is gone,” he sings, “I’ll wink at you through every sunset.”

“It makes me sick. And I don’t want to be dramatic, but the third verse makes me unable to breathe,” said Barnett, who along with Schnabel and his Ghost Shirt bandmates Jacob Wooten (guitar), Ryan Hayez (bass) and David Murphy (drums) a record release show at Rumba Cafe on Saturday, July 13. “Every parent has thought about this, and every parent has woken up at 2 a.m. and been in an abyss of horror knowing this is going to happen. But nobody looks at it long enough to process it. And I’m not sure there’s a way to process it. The therapist in me says, ‘This is impossible. It’s like eating a building.’ … My experiences (with my kids) are the most precious thing that’s ever happened to me. And they’re fleeting, just like everything else. And a big part of me can never believe that. And I wanted to write about it. And I think writing that song at least brought me back into a healthy sense of denial where I could function and be a human again. I think a lot of the album is like that, asking, ‘What are you really thinking about when you’re 40?’ And it’s not about chicks and rock ‘n’ roll and bars. I mean, maybe it is for some people. But I don’t get any of that. It’s just existential sadness and angst and wondering what the hell I’m doing here and what even makes sense anymore.”

For Schnabel, “Child of Illusion” was a different but equally powerful song: A rough demo version landed in her inbox as she was still reeling from the death of a former student in September 2023. As a middle and high school teacher, she can have students in her classroom for up to eight years, Schnabel said. Those long-established bonds last even after some students have moved on to college or beyond.

“And as a teacher, I’ve really started to realize over the last few years that I’m part of this huge community of people and experiences and that we’re all connected in this very strange but very real way,” said Schnabel, who recalled a Ghost Shirt concert in October when she completely broke down as the band played the song “Orphans.” “So when I got to those songs and got comfortable with them, it was a little rough. And I listened to them and then had to take a break for a couple of weeks to process them because they were so heavy for me. It was on the edge for a while, and then maybe six months ago, it really started to click. … It was almost like I had to mourn the songs before I could move on.”

Barnett thanks Schnabel for Colored Pencil Dragons expansive sound — “Her string arrangements and her voice are really central to this album for me,” he said — and the band members counter the sometimes crushing weight of the lyrics with New Orleans-esque jazz flourishes (“Child of Illusion”), sun-drenched orchestral pop (“Sky Burial”) and, on “Shivering Fits,” slightly wicked, driving rock riffs that gradually give way to dancing piano and weightless violin. “I don’t remember who said it, but at some point someone said, ‘You write toothpaste commercials about death,'” Barnett said, drawing a laugh from Schnabel. “And I really like that juxtaposition. … I want it to be the catchiest pop banger with the most disturbing and honest lyrics I can pull out of me.”

Some of these songs were written after the pandemic, at a time when Barnett lost an uncle to coronavirus and a grandfather to Alzheimer’s, while also battling long-COVID disease that left him with temporarily debilitating neurological symptoms.

“And I really struggled with all of that, to the point where I was getting depression and panic attacks, not being able to sleep, not being able to get out of bed,” he said. “I was still taking care of my kids, still going to work, so it wasn’t a total shutdown. But I was absolutely miserable all the time for a long time after the early pandemic. … And honestly, it was like I needed to channel those feelings into something tangible, something I could box off, because I’m not at my best for anyone right now. And for me, that mechanism is music. … So a lot of it was really complacent, like, ‘I need this and hopefully it works.’ And it has. I’m not resolute about death, or death with children, of course. But I definitely feel like it’s under control now, which wasn’t the case for a long time. And I feel a lot more peaceful about a lot of these issues now.”