MEREDITH BRAGG

Virginian Meredith Bragg puts his own twist on singer-songwriter

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 20, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

MEREDITH BRAGG, NEST (The Kora)

“I’ve always wrestled with the idea of ‘singer-songwriter’,“ admits Arlington’s Meredith Bragg. “I think people get a particular idea or image in their head when they hear that. But I haven’t been able to come up with a better moniker, so I guess I’m stuck with ‘singer-songwriter.’“

SWEET VIRGINIAN: His delivery brings to mind Elliott Simth

     The 35-year-old Bragg was indeed the guy who wrote and sang songs he then brought to a band on his 2005 debut, An inquiry into the nature of pressure waves through eleven songs by Meredith Bragg with his band the Terminals, Vol. 1. But, as the title suggests, it wasn’t your rote heart-on-your-sleeve, dude-with-a-guitar offering. Bragg’s wistfully soft delivery and tendency to layer his vocals did earn immediate and favorable comparisons to the late Elliott Smith. But his penchant for penning impressionistic, non-linear lyrics rather than straightforward confessionals marked him as something quite different from your typical, well, singer-songwriter.
     “It’s always flattering to have that comparison,“ Bragg says of the many times his name has been mentioned in the same breath as Smith’s. “It’s also funny because the first time I actually heard Elliott Smith is when I was recording with another band and the producer mentioned that when I double tracked the vocals, it sounded like Elliott Smith. I had never heard him, so they handed me one of his records — I think it was XO. And then I went out and bought XO and Either/Or. They remain two of my favorite records.“
    Bragg was still with the Terminals — cellist Elizabeth Olson, drummer Jon Roth, and multi-instrumentalist Brian Minter — when he recorded the more collaborative 2006 release The Departures EP. But when he and his wife moved to Charlottesville later that year, Bragg finally found himself on his own with what you might call the standard tools of a conventional singer-songwriter — his voice and an acoustic guitar. What followed, the 2007 full-length Silver Sonya, was anything but conventional.
     “I couldn’t really get together with the band, so I decided to put out a solo record,“ he recalls. “And part of the idea was to give myself extreme limitations just to see what would happen. I worked with Chad Clark, a fantastic producer, and PJ Lipple; the three of us cut it up and messed around with it, treated it, and put it back in the songs to the point where they sounded like beats and ethereal strings and weren’t even recognizable as either guitar or vocals. I like the idea of creating walls and being able to delve into just the few things that you have there. It was also fun to figure out what you can do with production. You do have to limit yourself or you can end up going down the rabbit hole.“
     Bragg took that production know-how back to Arlington, where he’s resettled with his wife and their one-year-old daughter. And he also reunited the members of the Terminals when he entered the studio to record his new album Nest, a disc that finds an artful and compelling balance between the cut-and-paste avant-folk atmospherics of Silver Sonya and a sound more grounded in the rock of indiedom. Those haunting echoes of Elliott Smith remain, especially when Bragg pares down to simply strummed acoustic guitar chords on the reflective “Civilians” and harmonizes with himself against the shimmering, fingerpicked-guitar backdrop of “Arrowstork.“ And Bragg isn’t afraid to settle occasionally into something resembling a natural, if expressionistic, narrative in “Civilians,“ with verses like “Take me in/Into the summer haze/Hold me closer/A smile across your face/The light is right/The reasons are wrong/Seasons pushing/Pushing us along.“
     Elsewhere, it’s all about drone, tone, and texture. Quiet synths intersect with subdued electric guitars, and rhythms that seamlessly blend real drums with looped grooves to create the lush electro-organic soundscape of “Second Golden Age,“ as Bragg drops intriguing lines like “Take a minute for the breath to stretch and catch inside/Take a minute to check if we’re alive.“ Olson’s cello brings a chamber-pop feel to the rockier “Birds of North America,“ a track that builds calmly toward a buoyant, melodic climax. And in “Point, Line, and Plane,“ a song inspired by the ideas of the Russian artist/theorist Wassily Kandinsky, Bragg, who again has Clark on board producing, ponders the sublime in a near whisper with little more than random samples to guide him.
     “I consider it one long arc,“ Bragg says of where his muse had led him. “For whatever reason people are calling this the solo record. But even if you have songs, when you bring them to a group they put their imprint on them. You could really say the same about producers, especially the way I go back and forth. At the end of the day it’s very easy to stay in a comfort zone with an acoustic guitar and a voice. I feel like I’ve done that before, and I can still do that. But I like a little more experimentation and the give and take of collaboration.“
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