Dw Dunphy Brings Angry Music For Anxious Times With The First Thing That Came To Mind

    RED BANK, NJ, December 22, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- 2016 goes into the history books as a year of unprecedented anxiety, uncertainty, and profound loss and change. Across the Internet, thinkpieces proliferate regarding how the loss of many will be felt for years to come, but the gratitude for being away from the previous cluster of 365 days will not. Musician Dw. Dunphy shares in the muted relief, although his new album The First Thing That Came To Mind does not.

Dunphy prefaces his description of the recording with, "It got tense." Started in earnest in December 2015, with the final song added roughly one year later, he described why the process to write and record The First Thing That Came To Mind took so long. "You look at your heroes -- musical heroes, cultural heroes -- at least in 2016, dying off like some great and horrible fish-kill after an algae bloom and you wonder if you have the right to say your piece."

Songs appeared slowly, much slower than Dunphy's standard pace. "I've been called prolific, which is a nice way of saying I don't have much of a social life and I direct it all to music-making. But there was that stretch of time when it didn't feel important enough, or like my profile didn't warrant the effort, in the aftermath of all this change."

By mid-summer 2016 Dunphy's attitude shifted. "I think I got my second wind. I thought that you need to do your thing now, while you can, and not complain about having not tried later. That kind of fueled me to stop watching things go by and start actually making not just music but all manner of different creative efforts."

Much of Dunphy's reticence is seen in the lyrics of the title track, available for free for a limited time from the album's Bandcamp page (https://dwdunphy.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-thing-that-came-to-mind). "On my own, I saw the future -- it made me sick and scared" and "The first thing that came to mind: has the hive been diseased? The drones are all dying in waves and the queen is killing to leave" hardly sound like feel-good summertime hits.

"If you are feeling the anxiety in the culture and you don't actually state it, if you shunt it off and don't acknowledge it, that's a sort of compliance," Dunphy said. "You do not have to agree with the anxiousness, but to deny its existence -- to stare at the truth and bald-facedly say 'It doesn't fit my chosen narrative, so I'm going to pretend it is something else,' is something like a suicide pact. Ignoring ugly truth is like believing the antifreeze is citrus soda and then drinking it. 'The First Thing That Came To Mind' really is about expressing what you're seeing when you see it, not trying to wish it away or pretend it's something it's not."

When asked how he thinks listeners will respond to the album, Dunphy is blunt. "I don't think people will necessarily like it. I think they will appreciate and agree with some of the ideas, but it is a rather hard record. Unlike The Radial Night which ha a few ballads, this is a bleak album and is intended to be. In that, I think it is an honest record and hope listeners will approach it with that spirit of understanding."

The First Thing That Came To Mind is available at: https://dwdunphy.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-thing-that-came-to-mind

About The Co-Op

The Co-Op is an artist-supported collective devoted to shifting the balance of opportunities toward independent musicians. Presented as a subsidiary of Introverse Media, Ltd., The Co-Op maintains that the "underground" is just as vital, interesting, and unique as it has ever been and needs a bullhorn to make that statement clear. For more information regarding The Co-Op, contact Dw Dunphy at [email protected]

# # #