Interview: Michael Braunfeld consumed by art for new album, ‘Driver’

It’s hard not to answer the call of an artistic muse. You may bury it just long enough that it comes storming out of your head like a ravaging whirlwind twirling up the coastline. So, you do things for the sake of art ⏤ satisfying some urge that’s indescribable most days. But you push onward and soon must make sacrifices in order to keep your creative motors running; maybe’ll you spin rubber or remain stagnant in the thick, hardened mud. An artist’s life is a hard, yet vital, one to our human existence. Returning with his first full-length record in four years, Philadelphia singer-songwriter Michael Braunfeld breaks his heart across the pavement as he shuffles between strands of Americana and folk music with heart-rending fashion. His precision and dedication to the craft is a marvel across the 13-track release. Driver, produced by the Grammy-winning Glenn Barratt (Susan Werner, Melody Gardot) and Kyle Swartzwelder, seeks answers to such questions as: “Am I doing what I’m here to do? Am I setting a good example? Am I putting forth good into the world? Could I be kinder or more understanding of what others may be going through in life? Am I taking care of myself and those that I love the best that I can?”

Braunfeld bares his existential meditations in amber lamplight, his words pouring out hot and unrelenting. “Take these shackles off my legs / Let me do what I do best / My heart, my head, my soul possessed / I don’t know if I’m cursed or blessed,” he molds his profusely-gushing tears into ice-picked sculptures that tower above him. With “Driver,” he primes the listener for a mesmeric and evocative soul-search. It’s the kind of sojourn into the middle of the desert, where he’s left parched and unfulfilled, but it quickly yields enlightenment he’s never quite known. “You dropped out of school ’cause you thought it was best / You headed off to a new life out in the midwest / There was talk of a baby that never arrived / There was a boy and a pair of black eyes,” sings Braunfeld on “Stay,” staging a mournful retrospective on first love. “This Town” shuffles through the descending dust of a town now lost to time and booze, while he takes the brunt of all “Fear” onto his shoulders, the pressuring rising and his bones cracking. But he never buckles or shows devastating weakness; he simply exposes his wounds in song to perhaps move us or impart wisdom on living, loving, losing.

“Some nights, you’ve got to fake it if you can,” he sings on essential deep-cut “Maline,” which braids together such threads of a working musician’s life as unappreciated craft, artistic pay-off and the hard-knock life itself. “I feel like I’m writing the kinds, and caliber, of songs that I want to be known for and performing them onstage at a high level. I’m on a fairly good trajectory artistically and professionally right now but none of my heroes ever got too well known or rich,” Braunfeld writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “In the end, no matter what, I’d like songwriters to respect what I put out into the world. It would be nice if it all paid a bit more now and then.”

His heavy truths hang as trembling, uncertain poetry on his tongue, and so, he must wrangle his emotions to get to the heart of the matter. “I would say that I have made peace with the sacrifices it takes to live this kind of life. But there are days ⏤ when you’re sick in some hotel room, missing your family and just wishing you were home ⏤ where you sometimes probably wish you were cut out for a more stable and sane line of work,” he continues. Later, in “Maline,” he pulls back his bow on those first few years returning to music back in 2013, singing, “It’s a young man’s game / At least, that’s what they say.” His brokenness, wrought with self-doubt on age and his dreams of raising a family, serves him well and permits him to uncork the kind of raw, flooding human emotions with which we are all afflicted.

“I used to say that I was a recovering singer-songwriter that fell off the wagon. I was writing a lot and good opportunities kept coming my way. Everything just sort of exploded unexpectedly,” he says. “My thoughts centered on my children. They were four and almost eight and had never known anything about that side of me. When I walked away, it was for the dream of a family. That came true. When I made the decision to return, I wanted to show them the importance of pursuing a calling in life.”

Braunfeld’s pluck glows throughout much of Driver, intimate in scale but reverberating across the universe. Ultimately, he showcases not only the gravity of never letting his dreams die out but he underlines many shades of the human journey. Darkness, pain and lonesomeness bleed over into joy, light, love and liberty. Such pinnacles as “A Winter’s Wish” (weeping on those who’ve been lost along his way) and “Philip Hoffman is Dead (Nika)” dig deep into tragedy in a truly remarkable way. Below, the Americana man discusses the album’s emotional heft, coming into his own, Philip Seymour Hoffman and time’s unwavering hand.

You wrote “Maline” for your daughter. What did writing this song and your first trip to the Kerrville folk Festival teach you?

I had always dreamed of getting to the Kerrville New Folk Competition and went down in 2016 with what I felt was the best song I had ever written. All of the finalists are riding an emotional locomotive that’s constantly threatening to derail ⏤ no matter what anyone tries to tell you. New Folk weekend at Kerrville is almost as agonizing as it is amazing. I came to win, and I didn’t. It threw me for a little, but I didn’t lose faith in myself or my songs. I don’t write songs to win contests. “Maline” is about the ups and downs, the victories and losses and urging both of my children to never give up on their dreams.

“This Town” is another striking moment as you explore passage of time and moving on from the past. What provoked this song?

Honestly, it all started with a Telecaster and a Deluxe Reverb. I just fell into the chord progression and didn’t have any sort of grand scheme to tackle small town life in a rust belt town. Sometimes, that’s just where the muse takes you, I guess. The song is about Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which is experiencing an amazing resurgence that I would never have imagined possible when I was younger and used to perform regularly there. So, the scenes in the song are more out of the 1990s ⏤ though aside from the film reference, it could be about any number of American towns today. “This Town” is about growing up in a place where the factories and stores aren’t coming back and wanting more. I think that feeling ⏤ of wanting to escape ⏤ is something that most people can relate to…no matter where they come from.

Your father is the centerpiece of this song, which is both melancholic and hopeful. You seem to resign to the utter uncertainty of life and small-town living. Within this framework, what has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned in life?

Take your shot. Work as hard as you can for an opportunity. Work as hard as you can when you are given an opportunity. Work as hard as you can to be the best at whatever it is you do and the best possible person you can be. Take your shot. Don’t end up wondering what might have been because it all seemed too scary once upon a time.

“Philip Hoffman is Dead (Nika)” is just a flooring performance. “A stout silver maple came down with a crack and a crash” is one of your most evocative lyrics. How did you come to employ nature as a discussion piece on this tragedy?

Philip Seymour Hoffman died as Winter Storm Nika covered the East Coast in ice. He was one of the great actors of my generation and yet another artist who succumbed to his demons. I don’t like to dwell on the cliché that all artists are tortured souls, but I do think that many use their craft as a means of escape from something dark. And I believe that truly great artists have a heightened sensitivity and empathy that allow them to inhabit the lives of others and tell their stories. That is a painful process and one not easily shut off. The ice was the perfect metaphor. It made everything once pedestrian perfect. It made that maple tree so beautiful…and then it killed it.

You later sing: “As I think to myself, as my lungs breathe in brisk, burning air / That the burden of beauty can be too much for one life to bear.” What was your emotional headspace leading into and during writing this song?

Oddly, enough, I was doing well. We lost power for nearly a week, but the house has two fireplaces and a gas stove. We had food and water. We camped out together in our sleeping bags every night by the fire. We read the children fairy tales by candle light. In the daylight, we walked in an ice-covered wonderland. It was magical. Then more trees and branches started coming down. I was stunned by Hoffman’s death, and I was struck by the similarities and how, sometimes, what makes something remarkable is too painful a burden to carry.

Unfortunately, it has taken a long string of similar tragedies for the conversation on mental health and addiction to shift, which has happened over the past five years or so. Musicians, especially, have come out more and more to talk about their struggles, either in conversation or song. Will music continue to be vital to this conversation?

I hope so. I am always encouraged when I see artists write honestly about, or discuss openly, their struggles with mental illness and addiction. I think anything that helps to erase the stigma is a positive step. We recently lost a close friend to suicide. She had survived an earlier attempt and spent the rest of her life trying to eradicate the stigma of mental illness. She was a daughter. She was a sister. She was a wife. She was a mother. She was a fighter. She was a warrior. And she fell. We’ve got to do better.

“A Winter’s Wish” carries with it an equally stunning heaviness. “Well, I miss so many people that I’ll never see again / Some moved on / Some have passed / Some live upon the wind” is a wallop of a lyric. What led you to reflect upon life’s fleeting nature?

I had just returned from my first long run of dates, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. The last show of the tour was my first appearance at a Writer’s Night at The Bluebird Cafe, and it happened to fall on the first anniversary of my mother’s passing. She had always wanted to see me play that room and never got the chance. The other reflection in the line goes back to the realities of being a performing songwriter. A lot of your good friends ⏤ the ones that really get you ⏤ live on the road or far, far away. You get to see them every once in a while at a festival or conference if your schedules happen to align. But it’s usually never enough.

As human beings, time proves to be rather merciless. What has been your relationship with time and how does that emerge on the record as a whole?

Look, nobody gets around time or will ever beat it. I’m at the point now where I can look in two directions. I still look forward to the future, but I think of my past and the past, in general, as well. ‘Driver’ covers a lot of temporal ground. You have me as a teenager in “Stay” and a young man in “Fear.” And you have me as I am today in “Driver,” “Maline” and “A Winter’s Wish.” Obviously, the younger Michael had hopes and dreams and some sort of plan for his life. There have been good times and bad times, but I’m still hoping and dreaming and charting a course.

“I’m just trying to make it / As far as this house goes, it’s already underwater,” you sing on “Washed Away.” Generally, you are dissecting the American dream and taking a reading of the current sociopolitical environment. What do you hope the listener learns from this song?

I hope they don’t instinctively jump to their entrenched political beliefs and that they listen. It’s not a political song. It’s telling the human side of the story ⏤ which is real no matter who you voted for. One of the first times I played that song, a man got in my face saying, “There are good jobs out there. Some people are just too lazy to work.” OK. Fine. He totally missed what the characters are dealing with and the entire point of the song. Some people are working multiple jobs and still falling through the cracks. They want to work. They want to provide for their families. But the American Dream that was promised by our teachers and our leaders has been getting harder and harder to achieve with each generation. It should be hard. But it shouldn’t be so hard. Let’s do something about that while we still can.

You’ve been performing “Fear” in your live set for a minute. Why did it make sense to your story to record now?

We had a band that could make it sound the way I had always heard it in my head, and people still want to own it on a record. It’s a staple of most of the Boneyard Hound Shows. We recorded it knowing we could always cut it if we felt that it didn’t make sense or add to the project’s cohesiveness. But we liked it a lot and agreed that it added one more example of the tools I’ve got in my belt. It’s this pop-rock power ballad toward the end of a collection of Americana and folk songs. And it’s a rare love song. Why not have some fun?

How has your relationship changed since you first wrote it?

I wrote “Fear’ when I was 23. My wife and I had just started dating, and it was written with all of the passion, hopefulness and youthful naiveté that you’d expect. It’s easy to think that, with nary a cloud on the horizon, you’ll be able to give your partner everything that they need and keep them safe, sound and happy forever and ever. We’ve been married almost 18 years now and together for 21 and, of course, there have been some hard times in there. Marriage, kids, jobs, life…none of this stuff is easy. I still sing the song for her. But now the words take on more meaning. I still want to make her happy. I still want to protect her. I still want it to last forever. I just know what I’m talking about now.

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