David Franklin Courtright today has announced his debut LP Brutal Tenderness, out August 8th via TODO Records. To coincide with the announcement, he has also shared his serene, beautifully stripped-back single "Boy." "I wrote 'Boy' a few months after I moved to Los Angeles in early 2019. I met this boy that I had really intense feelings for and on our second date I was so nervous (and made the mistake of getting stoned) that I was so in my head I could barely participate in the date," Courtright explains. "I even had to go to his bathroom and like give myself a pep talk in the mirror. This song came out of that feeling of panic, being so in your own head that you don’t know who you are around someone or think maybe the person that you truly are won’t be lovable or attractive. It’s an ode to being a shy guy and all the feels that come with falling in love."
Brutal Tenderness, taken from a line in Frank O’Hara’s poem “River,” is the debut album of David Franklin Courtright. It is a work about radical tenderness and joy in the face of sadness, loss, and fear. Written and recorded over a span of eight years and three continents, the work seeks to explore the seemingly opposing forces (or bipolarity) of brutality and tenderness, to guide the listener through a deep-hearted journey of love and grief, of fractures and healing. It is a kaleidoscope of emotional and kinetic soundscapes.
Brutal Tenderness is a process of reckoning with a life as a queer boy who couldn’t pass and was never allowed to hide, of setting free that gleefully expressive cartwheeling child who was put into hiding, locked beneath a veneer of false masculinity, and entombed in a character to avoid persecution. It is a triumphant and harrowing reclamation.
The new record is a love poem to that child-self, and to the person today who can exist in these realms of sadness without the compulsion to run from them or bury or hide them from the world, and in that patient practice, can touch and inhabit and know those sadnesses while being able to also know and touch and inhabit joy, and love, and inner peace.
"Boy" by David Franklin Courtright is out today via TODO.
Release Shows:
8/2 - Los Angeles, CA - St. Athanasius Chapel
8/8 - New York, NY - Union Pool
8/14 - Atlanta, GA - Commune | 
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