Tom Brosseau
Posthumous Success (FatCat Records)

Tom Brosseau’s third full-length for FatCat, Posthumous Success, marks a huge stylistic shift away from the spare, acoustic arrangements of his previous releases, notably 2007’s Cavalier, produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels). During spring, summer and fall of 2008, Brosseau worked with two producers and a handful of guest musicians to flesh and clothe his songs’ sturdy skeletons, lending them breath, presence, and limb-stretching immediacy.

Unchanged, however, is Brosseau’s earnest wit, near-unearthly emotional grasp, and captivating, vibrato-soaked voice. With Posthumous Success (named after a chapter from a biography of Albert Camus), Brosseau brings his best group of songs into a sonically rich environment, resulting in a buoyant, well-crafted, and sprawlingly lovely album. It is his most accomplished and inviting effort to date.

Posthumous Success was recorded in multiple sessions on two coasts: Adam Pierce of Mice Parade helming at his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, with Pierce also handling drum duties; other players include guitarist Rob Laakso (Amazing Baby, Wicked Farleys) and vocalist Jayme Layne. In Portland, OR, with producer Ethan Rose of Small Sails, Tom is joined by vocalist Shelley Short as well as Rose’s bandmates Adam Porterfield and Gary Jimmerson.

Posthumous Success finds Brosseau drawing on a wide list of influences – literary, musical, and otherwise – from Hemingway, Georges Bataille, and Flannery O’Connor, to Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind, to the film soundtracks for The Natural and The Man Who Wasn’t There, to the declining population of Detroit, polar bears and ice caps, and the oil derricks of western North Dakota.

This wide-ranging, ambitious list of influences may explain why Brosseau’s lyrics reach an apex of challenge and richness on this new album. As Brosseau explained in a 2007 interview: “My songs are changing. If printed out they'd mostly be in italics. I am interested in exploring the literary side of things, blowing out the walls of conventional song-writing.”

This literary bent is nowhere more evident than in the fuzzed-out bricolage of “You Don’t Know My Friends,” which finds Brosseau combining lyrics like “Hot cars at the Taj/Pretty trophies in the garage,” and “Looking gaunt and living on beans and rice/I’m beginning to laugh like Vincent Price” into a sharp reflection on personal geography and failed relationships.

The songs themselves are embellished, expanded and orchestrated by a confident harmonic structure that naturally extends itself from the smaller scale of Tom’s past works without confining the pure spirit of North American blues that finances the immense emotional impact of his songs. (Appropriately, Tom bookends the album with two versions of the joy-in-despair confessional “My Favorite Colour Blue.”)

Born and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Tom Brosseau now resides in Los Angeles. His dense musical, cultural, and personal histories have helped him create an album of great beauty, stillness, intimacy and celebration.

back to top