Premiere: M. Tennyson discovers a glorious ‘Spark’ to change
A dear friend of mine told me a story of her recent visit back to her hometown. Her name is unimportant here, but it is what she said that has left a profound and deeply-affecting imprint on my heart. She hadn’t been back in five years. To say she’s a completely different person is an understatement. She now runs an insanely successful and competitive vocal studio. She’s living the dream that she always deserved, one of glee and hope and rainbow kitties. As she reflected upon her visit, she came upon a few epiphanies, the biggest one of all on change and how some people become trapped by familiarity, even if the circumstances around them are toxic and unhealthy. The things my friend would have done five years ago have long been in her rearview mirror. “Life’s about change and nothing ever stays the same,” country legend Patty Loveless sings in one of her ballads. And that’s true. Nothing in our lives ever does stay the same, even if we’ve staged this fantastical, time-warped world in our mind where our college town is exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. It’s not, and it never will be.
We all get older. We all pass in and out of each others lives. That’s the human existence on the most basic level. So, we must change. It’s inevitable. Queer singer-songwriter M. Tennyson (full name Mark Cramer Tennyson) had his moment, too, and he wrote it down in the form of his new song “Spark,” a trippy, intoxicatingly-lush musing, premiering via B-Sides & Badlands today. “I roll out of bed back into my head to live with the doubts I accept / Bracing inside while stroking my pride, shifting gears in a losing race,” he ponders, a gusty blend of hip-hop-structured drums and guitar tingles sliding into view. “Hiding every scar that I can’t erase / I can’t hide from time with a changing face.”
When he turned 30, that’s when life reminded him of the need to change. He explains, “[This song] is about that moment of recognition in our lives where we realize, in the quiet of our stillness, that change is truly possibly.” And so, he made some changes, reassessed his priorities and was reborn in a pretty enlightened way. “Spark” is an illuminating and timely confession, chiseled in effervescent and glowing synths, allowing his vocal to shatter the static and come clean. The song samples his forthcoming Boy Untitled EP, which accompanies his five-part, fully-illustrated book called A Wanderer’s Love Letter to the Universe.
Tennyson will perform the entire EP at his June 16 show at NAVEL in downtown Los Angeles. Danny Dolan choreographs. Details here.
Listen below:
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