How do you introduce a songwriter as ambitious, as multifaceted, and enigmatic as Ron Brunk with a single track? You don’t. Brunk is the kind of writer who can’t be easily summarized. He’s tried so much, recorded so much, made so many jokes, unleashed so many keen social observations and smithed so many memorable melodies that no solitary example of his artistry is sufficient.
We’d like to send you his entire catalog — and we’re confident that once you embrace his Brunkiness, you’ll wade into the multi-track, multi-album discography on your own. But for today, we’re keeping it modest. Here, then, are two songs and two videos by an artist who never saw compositional ground he couldn’t cover. They’re very different. But they’re both pure Brunk, and they couldn’t come from the mind of anybody else.
Take “Lemon Mountain Manatee.” Here is Brunk at his most whimsical, piling surreal images atop each other like a great stack of pillows, engaging in the wordplay, free association, and wit that his fans have come to expect from him. Call it a children’s song for grownups — a playful expression of wonder and delight and a peek behind the drab surface of quotidian reality into a vibrant, hidden world. The music, too, feels like discovery in action. This is guitar pop, but it’s uncommonly sophisticated, and it sounds as welcoming as a handshake from a friend. Ron Brunk foregrounds his sprightliness and verve, and delivers it all with a smile. It feels like he’s singing with his eyes wide open.
“Fading” is just as aware, and just as present to the moment. Its tone, however, is far more ruminative. This is Ron Brunk the realist, the street-corner philosopher and soul poet, reflecting on the trajectory of being and costs of living that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. He’s matched it with music that hews closer to the Americana that you might expect to get from an independent artist from West Virginia, but the melody is as hooky as that of any pop hit. If “Manatee” is a brilliant dawn, “Fading” is the twilight. It doesn’t seem possible that the same album could accommodate these two tracks, but they fit right in on the flexible, varied, and endlessly colorful Love Bomb — an album that, like all sets by Ron Brunk, tells a story in sound.
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