Garett Brennan

Stoked to announce that the talented Forrest VanTuyl will be opening up the night for us on 4/13 at The Ruins in Hood River. Snag your tickets early!

Forrest VanTuyl is a Western songwriter, poet, and working cowboy based in the Inland Northwest. His brand of western music is less about day to day cowboy life and more about what crosses your mind when you stop counting switchbacks on a trail or while you’re waiting for a heifer to calve. It’s the rhythms that come from what first sounded like silence at daybreak in the canyons. His work has been featured by the New York Times, the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and commissioned by the US Forest Service.

July 2, 2021

Dear Friends and Fans,

Today I released a new collection of music that I started writing in the winter of 2020 and recorded this last winter with my good friend and long-time collaborator, Jon Neufeld: Songs for Sean, Vol. 1

I debated for months on whether to release these at all, as they are songs I wish I never had to write. On January 2, 2020, I lost my dear younger brother Sean in a tragic, freak ski accident at Alta, UT where we grew up. The songs emerged through a tender, painful songwriting process as I navigated an unimaginable journey through grief. Writing them took courage. And so does sharing them.

Songs for Sean, Vol. 1 is the first collection. While I don’t know how many volumes I will eventually record moving forward, I do know there will be more, because I know grief never leaves you. It stays with you forever and moves inside you like the ocean. Future volumes will likely take different shapes and forms, leaning in and out of spacious folk progressions, lush soundscapes and crusty old time—a genre Sean and I played countless hours of in the late-night corners of stairwells, porches, kitchen nooks and pubs.

I recorded these songs on Sean’s guitar. On the strings that still hold the dust of his callused fingers that he used to study salmon migratory patterns in Alaska, rock his children to sleep and dance with his sweet wife. While Sean was mostly an old-time banjo player, he picked the guitar up so he and his wife could sing country songs together. And years ago, when she wanted to give him a guitar for Christmas, she asked me to find one for him. So I spent almost year playing more than 50 guitars throughout the NW to find the small-body mahogany Martin on the album cover. When the time came to record these songs for Sean, it felt comforting to play them on his guitar, with his strings, in the attic of an old friend’s house. Jon Neufeld engineered the sessions, added electric guitars, a little nylon guitar, and some bass. He also mixed and mastered the sessions. Gabrielle Macrae from The Horsenecks added her fiddle and banjo parts at Kati Claborn’s studio (from The Hackles) in Astoria, Oregon. I am so grateful to all three of these amazing humans for stepping into this material with me. It was emotional for all of us.

I hope you appreciate the music, and as you listen, you are reminded of how beautiful life is. How precious it is. How fleeting our time here is. I hope listening inspires you to hold the ones you love even closer. I hope the raw, vulnerable sentiment we tried to capture inspires you to live as deep and full and kind as you can. And I hope that in sharing these songs, it helps us all heal a little from what has been such a difficult year for so many of us with COVID, Wildfires and racial unrest. No matter where you live, who you call family, and how you define community…these songs are for you too.

With love,
-garett