Premiere: Greg Felden sinks to his knees to beg, ‘Tell Me What’s Broken’

Heartache weaves as needle stabs through your entire body. Sometimes, you can’t help but succumb to such an existence. Life is full of beautiful twinges of sorrow, often coming as visions before it even starts to crumble. Northwestern folk-rock navigator Greg Felden lassos his bleeding heart and its quaking pangs with a song called “Tell Me What’s Broken,” premiering today, in which he attempts to make sense of a lover’s slow decline out and away from him. “Tell me what’s wrong, we don’t have to end it / Don’t put a wall up and try to defend it,” he sings, positing that he could possibly glue the pieces back together again. But the pain is far more than he anticipated.

Out of Eugene, Oregon, now a Los Angeles transplant, Felden pours his heart as tar onto gravel, thick and hot and pungent. “And I know we went wrong / We came off the track / But I like what we had / And I just want it back,” he continues to nudge the tenuous emotional strands connecting their bodies in a cosmic orbit, perhaps allowing them to healing once again (or not). “But there’s something not open / In the words that you’ve spoken.” Felden, who readies his debut album, out later this year, sees right through the facade, and the cracks act as a microscope peering into each soul, the atoms themselves seemingly swollen and red.

“This one came quickly and is so satisfying to play. The recording really captured the live sound. Every time I listen, I’m amazed how good these players are,” writes Felden to B-Sides & Badlands over email, citing organically bedeviling playing from musicians Jason Gonzalez and Jerry Borger. “[They] really cut loose, and the whole band gets to show what they can do. Man, do they do it well!”

“Tell Me What’s Broken” samples Felden’s debut, Made of Strings (expected June 14), which is not only a musical powerhouse setpiece but emerges as a tribute to his late girlfriend, Samantha Morris. While Felden carved away at the collection, a rather visceral, yet rollicking, 10 songs, Morris was battling cancer and later passed away, an act of sheer bravery that fuses onto the album in the way Felden approaches each lyric as if its is last will and testament. In such a devastating context, “Tell Me What’s Broken” is strengthened with even more remarkably sinewy character and heart. “Don’t say that it’s over / When I’m just beginning,” he later weeps into a whirlwind of guitar and percussion, layers that seek to soothe and redeem him.

Made of Strings is now up for pre-order.

Listen below:

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