Sound of...Podcast
Highlighting Maryland's musical artist's that have played our showcases and beyond! Hosted by Stephen Harrod (AKA Scott of the Andes), we delve into the songwriters journey and intentions as to why they create. If you want to know about Maryland's local songwriters, this is the podcast for you! Be sure to catch one of our showcases going on throughout the year, happy listening!
Sound of...Podcast
Burnsie Returns-EP16
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Sound of Podcast. I am your host, Steven, and returning to the show, we have Bernsey, and she has brought her debut EP with her. Peacekeeper is out everywhere on all streaming platforms, and we had a lovely discussion and really got to the nitty-gritty of what her debut EP is all about. I hope you enjoy it. Take it away.
SPEAKER_01And action. Action.
SPEAKER_02You're back, Callie Burns. They said they said it couldn't be done. They said that she wouldn't do it. She wouldn't come back a second time.
SPEAKER_01But here I am.
SPEAKER_02But way back when, it was like a year ago, maybe. I think so.
SPEAKER_01No, was it in 2024 that we did this?
SPEAKER_02I think it's 2025. Really? Oh. You're like, I'm gonna have my EP ready and we'll come back to this. So here we are.
SPEAKER_01So here we are coming back to this. Okay.
SPEAKER_02It took some time, but art always does. Yes. And you have the EP, the peacekeeper. I mean, could you give a quantifiable number how long it took from start to finish?
SPEAKER_01From start to finish in terms of a recording start to finish or a writing and all of that start to finish.
SPEAKER_02Let's go farther back and say writing. So like what's the oldest song on there?
SPEAKER_01There's a song on there. Um it's five songs total. And there is a little interlude song that's the third track on the EP called Ashland City. And I wrote that in 2020. I wrote that in the fall of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. I was living in Tennessee. Um excuse me, I was living like 25 minutes south of Ashland City, Tennessee. And I wrote this cute little Diddy all the way back in 2020. So that's technically the oldest song on the record on the EP. Um, but the collection of five songs that I picked, they're all from within the last five years, aside from Ashland City, more specifically from like 2023 on. But the recording and the choosing final mixes and mastering and getting all the instrumentation the way I wanted and getting musicians hired to do it exactly how I had envisioned, all of that took almost exactly two years. Um, so we started recording in May of 2024, and then by May of 2026, it was finally all finished and ready to go.
SPEAKER_02That's not bad for an album. I mean, and again, no, and it's only five songs though.
SPEAKER_01That feels kind of silly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but you know, it's it's your work, and I understand from an artist standpoint, you you want everything to be right and you want everything to pass your your QC checks. And yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I am my hardest customer. Like I am my worst critic, but I'm also the most difficult to please when it comes to my own craft and my own art. And so a lot of points throughout the process over the last two years, like I wasn't passing my own quality checks. So I had to rely on my engineer and really close friends to be like, no, dude, you're overthinking it. You know, it doesn't have to be this flawless, overproduced, you know, mess of something. This is your art. This is supposed to be raw. As long as you can feel like you've succeeded in the messaging of the full EP, it doesn't matter if it's like a completely flawless vocal take. It doesn't matter if there's like a little tiny organic sound in the background. Like no one's gonna care about those things. You just have to be happy that you've accomplished something. So it's been it's been hard to let go of my own perfectionism over the last two years, but we are finally here.
SPEAKER_02I mean, it sounds to me like like I was listening to it in the car yesterday, and and granted, you know, there's conditions might not sometimes be optimal depending on on where you hear it, but I am kind of an audiophile when it comes to that of I at the end of the day, I don't want to listen to it on my my poopy phone speaker. Like I'm either if I want to really listen to an album, I'm listening to it on headphones, or I'm listening to it like just in a in a space that it's going to add to the quality. And no, I mean it sounds wonderful.
SPEAKER_01And thank you.
SPEAKER_02Um your vocals are all all of it is is there um crystallized in that way. And what's interesting is that since I met you, I've seen I saw Live Burnsy before I saw before I heard Studio Burnsy.
SPEAKER_01Yes, most people have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and in some ways, you know, you get like a taste of it um from the live setting, and I love the live setting too, but then you're also like as a listener um to me, you're like, well, what is the you know, what is the studio version of this, and what is a more I I guess polished controlled version of this sound like in my.
SPEAKER_01And something that has always scared me about recorded music, so for the folks listening, I have been a live performer since I was a little kid, and I have very little already recorded, released music, because recording as a as an art form and as a process just intimidates me like a lot. Um, and there's something that feels very finite about recording. Whereas if I'm performing my written songs or if I've I'm performing songs live, I can switch it up organically anytime I want to. For every show, it might sound a little bit different. The human voice is kind of unpredictable at times, so things are just gonna sound different almost every time I do a song live. But then when I go into a recording studio and I'm trying to nail it, so to speak, the the permanence of that recording is what really, really scares me. Um, and so that was also a hurdle trying to get these songs recorded because I didn't I didn't want it to be this rigid, fixed thing. I like the fluidity of live performance, and so it was hard. It was hard to let go of that in order to have recorded music for people to enjoy after they see me, you know, after they hear me live. The whole point of being a musician is to kind of give part of yourself over, and now I actually have something that I can give, and it it feels good, but it was scary as hell the whole time.
SPEAKER_02I I want to uh touch upon uh what I was talking about earlier with you of that these aren't songs in the sense of you're you're rhyming stuff with stuff in that each song is like uh you know, a situationally based um thing of this is your in the club song, this is your song about how prices are too high or whatever. To me, this EP when I was listening to it, it it is kind of in the tried true form of that it was a snapshot uh and a point in your life and from a situation, and it almost felt like we were going from different scenes from a movie in different aspects that it happened. Um, you know, stories, uh memories, it almost felt like. And I I guess the the harder question to you with that when you're making this EP peacekeeper, what what stays, you know, that that that hard question of which which babies are gonna be on this.
SPEAKER_01That's yeah, that's great. Well, first, thank you so much for the complimentary analysis there. It definitely very much is by design meant to feel like a time capsule. Um, similarly to how I view all of the tattoos on my body, all of the songs that I write are little mini time capsules of whatever emotion I was feeling, whatever event was occurring, whatever was happening. Even if I write the song, say four or five years, you know, decades after the emotion or the event, it's still reminiscent of what it was. So that's I really appreciate you saying that about the songs on the EP. And actually, a little bit of inside baseball, um, and we can come back to the story of how this all started in a second, but when I first reached out to my engineer, CJ Metz, and again, we'll talk about him more in a little bit. When I first reached out to CJ, I had the lofty hopes of a 10-song full album. Um, and I had different musicians in mind, and I had a totally different, I hadn't I had envisioned something totally different than this final product, and I wanted to do 10 songs with CJ, and it was going to be more of like an emo full band, you know, like alt emo album instead of what became this Folk Americana project. Um and then circumstances changed, and I had to make a decision on the fly because I had booked all this studio time with CJ, and I still really wanted to honor myself and honor that time dedicated. And so I sent CJ demos of a completely different collection of completely different ten set of songs, set of set of ten songs than what we had originally talked about. And he and I worked together to whittle those ten down and to into a cohesive four or five. Um, and so we picked four songs, and then I already mentioned it, but Ashland City is on there, and it's a very short little ditty, kind of like my most, my most pop song in air quotes. Um, but we turned it into a five-song EP instead of a 10-song record. And the way that we whittled it down is we kind of he had me do a lot of introspection, and he asked me, What are you trying to say? Like, what do you want this little collection to mean to you? What are you trying to convey? What do you want others to hear? Um, and so ultimately it became a concept EP, kind of by accident, um, because all of the songs that we eventually chose to record, they all had a common theme of this. How do I want to say this? It ended up accidentally becoming a breakup record. Um, and I don't know if that's obvious when you listen to it or not. I I know I didn't give you the lyrics previously, but it it ended up accidentally becoming a breakup record. And it's because those five songs were all little mini snapshots and time capsules again of different emotions I was feeling throughout the progression of one particular relationship. And it was from start to finish of that relationship and all of the highs and lows, all the really deep lows and the really high highs. And so that's kind of how we narrowed it down to these five songs. They all had one specific theme, and that thread connecting all of them was that they were all very specific emotions uh throughout the phases of one specific romantic relationship of mine.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Were you aware of that when you kind of started the whittling down process? Like, did that become clearer or it was after the fact and you're like, oh, this is this is the underlying It was very much after the fact.
SPEAKER_01We on the surface we picked those five songs because I just think that they're great songs and I like them, and I knew that they'd be quote unquote the easiest to record. I just kind of wanted something easy to knock out at that point because I had been very frustrated by the way things were kind of shaking out, and I was nervous about getting into the studio and it not being a fine experience, which it ended up being beautiful, and we'll talk about that. But yeah, at first they were just four or five songs that I thought would be easy to knock out that I liked that I still stood behind, like songs that still resonated with me, and ones that I thought were really important in who I am as a songwriter. And then as we're recording them and as CJ and I are, you know, kind of combing through ideas is when I realized that that was the common denominator across all of them.
SPEAKER_02Was it hard for you to uh I guess is the the figurative term of kill your babies in the way of whittling down the songs? Or did it it was pretty straightforward of like, no, it makes sense that that we would trim this in that way.
SPEAKER_01It definitely at the time made sense that we were going to trim it down that way, and it didn't feel like quote unquote killing off your babies because I realized all of those songs still are still going to have their time in the sun. It's just not time for them yet, is kind of how I felt about it. Um, and then in these five songs, in the process of picking them, recording them, finalizing them, I've been able to reclaim a lot of things about myself that I had lost throughout this relationship that this record is about, things that I had lost about my music career. It was a huge, almost like a big rehabilitation experiment, like a big reclamation of a lot of things that I had lost.
SPEAKER_02A catharsis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, a big catharsis. And that led to really big emotions every single time I would sit down to work on it or record it or listen to the mixes or listen to comp tracks, you know, like it was a big emotional release every single time I sat down to work on this, and you're kind of forgive my bluntness, you're kind of re-traumatizing yourself too, every time you start to like pick apart these really vulnerable and heavy songs. Um, and so like over the last two years, it just felt like I was constantly reopening wounds. But the final product is something so spectacular and something I never thought that I'd be able to accomplish. And so it's just such a huge, huge relief to finally have it all out there and it's it's it's ready now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that and that's so real what you're saying about kind of reliving it. And I think from a songwriter's perspective, yeah, there's definitely places that that we go that sometimes we're like, do I want to release this? You know, not just because like what it means to me, but granted, it if you kind of shelve it in that way, then maybe somebody's gonna miss out on your experience that is similar to their experience, and then you know, it's not shared in that way. But I I a hundred percent understand where you're coming from with that. Um I think sometimes I glaze over it in terms of you know, you sing the song long enough and you kind of not that you forget the meaning, but you're like, oh wait, this came from a very vulnerable and and hard place in that way.
SPEAKER_01Oh, totally. And I also because I've been performing all of my songs for a very long time, sometimes I lose the meaning too, even just in the live performance. And if I'm not connecting with the song, it's obvious in the live performance. But what's really cool is um I've because we chose these five songs and I've been working on them, the meanings have kind of shifted for me in in new ways, and it reinvigorates the it reinvigorates the energy, and I can perform these songs, and it's less like reopening old wounds and more like a south, like a band-aid, and it's been really fun.
SPEAKER_00Get it hurt and it's never harder.
SPEAKER_02And it's, I guess, as you would say, indie folk Americana. So I wanted to ask about what um what was that process of like what do you think is gonna go with this song? Was this something that you had the preconceived notion of this song is gonna sound good with a harmonica and strings, or how how did you come to these decisions for the songs?
SPEAKER_01Great question. It's a big answer, so I'm gonna try to distill it as best as I can. Um, like I had mentioned, my original thought, I thought I was gonna make an emo record. And I'm when I say emo, I mean like something akin to like the DIY sounds that I was hearing in college, kind of like Julian Baker, although I hate to just like throw her in there because I always get compared to her. But you know, I thought it was gonna be like a rock-driven album. And then we had to pivot. And so almost out of necessity, I had to come up with a backup plan. And the backup plan was we were gonna do a very stripped-down acoustic EP. And it was originally just gonna be me, my guitar, and some effects thrown on both. Um, but then working with my engineer CJ, he is so masterful at getting me out of my own head and getting me out of my own way that he was able to start kind of pitching ideas to me that made it feel like they were my idea.
SPEAKER_02That's the best. That's some good producing right there.
SPEAKER_01He's just phenomenal at doing that. And also um talking about the I recorded all of these at a cabin in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley. The recording studio is called Sill and Glade Cabin. And CJ Metz is the owner and engineer and producer. And there's something so inarticulably, is that the word, uh special about the environment, about the space. Um, and being in the Shenandoah Valley, like being in the hills and being in this beautiful, beautiful scenery, it inspired the folk and Americana vibes, and it it just made sense to me to kind of lean into that direction. And I had been heavily influenced by all of my friends in the bluegrass scene in Annapolis, and the the folks that walked with me on this journey are very supportive, and they're all fabulous bluegrass musicians, and so I wanted to kind of almost take this very specific timestamp of my life and incorporate both the person I was when I was writing this the these songs and the person I was when we stepped into the studio to record them. And I was, you know, very heavily influenced by the company I was keeping at the time. Um, and then through my friends and my connections to CJ, I met Eli Waltz, and Eli is the harmonica player on the record. I met Eli through some friends. He played 49 West Cafe in Annapolis, and I was blown away by him, just like absolutely mesmerized. He kind of sounds like if the Decemberists and Alt Jay had a baby, like his original stuff that I heard. Um fabulous musician. And I just reached out to him and I was like, Hey, you are an extremely extraordinary harmonica player, and I would be honored if you would come down to the studio in Virginia with me sometime and just add your magic to my songs. And we had a couple of FaceTime calls to discuss logist uh uh logistics and figure it out, and I had originally only wanted him on like one to two songs as like a highlight, as like a feature, and he ended up adding to all five songs, and it was incredible. And I couldn't have asked for a better collaborator, I couldn't have asked for a better performance from him, and he's a wonderful person, and he's so insightful and very philosophical. And so I explained to him and expressed what all these songs were about and what they meant to me, and he threaded that into his performance, and it was just unbelievable. But I met him just happenstance, you know, and then I asked him if he wanted to be on the record, and he really wanted to do that for me because he believed in what I was doing and believed in my assault as an artist, and that felt incredible. And then also through CJ and through my buddy Gage Rhodes, I met Perry Blosser, who's the fiddle player. And Perry, same thing. I just well, there were a few other folks. I'll back up. After Eli's harmonica part. I realized I needed something else besides just guitar, vocal, and harmonica. And I really wanted fiddle. And I was talking to CJ, and he was like, dude, I don't know if we should go with fiddle because harmonica and fiddle tend to take up the same frequency range. Like they tend to be very similar, and sometimes they can be competing, sometimes they can be really grating if they're occupying the same sonic space. And I was like, I hear you, but my reasoning is these songs are heavy and deep and emotional. I need something that matches that emotion. And to me, kind of having competing instruments felt like the exact tension I was trying to convey in the emotional material of the songs. And I was like, Pardon my French, fuck it. I want Perry on this record. And CJ had highly, highly, highly, highly recommended him as a session musician. And I said, Yeah, we have to get him in here. And same thing. I had floated it to Perry, and I thought he was only going to do one to two songs. He ended up tracking parts for all five songs. And we whittled it down in post to figure out exactly what we wanted to keep and what we didn't need. But again, it was a really high honor and a high compliment that Perry heard the songs and immediately knew he wanted to be a part of it and just believed in it like I did. And having folks around you that believe in what you're doing and want to contribute and can tell how much it means to you, like I've never experienced that in a professional sense. All of my friends and all of my family have always been supportive, but peers, like peers and near strangers, having their confidence gave me so much more confidence. And so kind of just in short, it all just flowed really naturally and almost accidentally. I really wanted mandolin on there for a while. I wanted additional vocalists on there for a while. I even thought about pedal steel and like leaning into and kind of riding on this like alt-country trend right now. And I thought about, you know, changing it up and adding full drums, but then I realized no, that's not congruent to who I am as a songwriter. And this is supposed to be this is more of an art piece than my moneymaker, you know. My this is my first, this is my debut EP. And so I wanted it to be a reflection of where I've been as a writer, where I was when we recorded it, and where I'm going next. Um, and just by the grace of the universe, I had all these people that wanted to get on board and have just truly, truly surprised me and made it exactly what it always needed to be.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. All all the pieces fell into place.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was kind of crazy how it happened. It just all happened very naturally. And um, our friend, our good friend Evan, Evan Frawley, Evan Sky, he's on it as well. He's playing bass for me. Yeah, he's he's holding down the low end for us, and he quick note um all of the musicians that are featured on this, they composed their parts themselves.
SPEAKER_02So all you didn't sit there and just ride them. No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01No, I gave direction and I gave guidance. Um, but for the most part, I was working with some really, really incredible musicians who all of that was just of their own, of their own creation. And again, that's also super flattering that they hear something and they're able to pull that out of thin air out of what I've started. So it very much felt like a big group project, and it completely obliterated how I used to feel about recording. It used to feel like a very intimidating and solo endeavor, but then we had this beautiful group project and everyone was collaborating together, and it really taught me what it means to play well with others, you know, and realize. So I for my whole uh uh artistic life, I've been a DIY kind of gal, like do it yourself. I'm learning each and every day, all of the time, that do it yourself does not mean you have to do it alone. And so very, very thrilled that I have this whole group of folks that made this happen with me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's all there on the record. I mean, the use of the harmonica, for example, is it's in ways that I, you know, as a listener, my my perception of harmonica is like blues-based and kind of aggressive and you know, um in the way that maybe many other people might think of, but the way in which the harmonica is used on the EP is just so it's it's not subtle. I mean, it's obviously it's there, you hear it, but just the emotion that that is channeling through it in that way that is again serving the songs.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Like it's um it it's what was needed, and it surely adds to like the um the the pieces that are on there.
SPEAKER_01And that's just real quick, like that's a huge testament of Eli's pro you know, Eli's musicianship and then CJ's ear as my producer and engineer as well. Like they they both kind of came in together to to create that, and also harking back to the time capsule idea about these being little timestamps, I really wanted it to kind of feel nostalgic, like talking about memory. It's like I wanted the whole thing to feel like a memory, to feel nostalgic, to feel ethereal. And so I told Eli, one of the directions I told him is well, one, I love Blaise Foley, so play like Blaise Foley, and two, campfire vibes. Oh like I want this to be the kind of record that you feel like you're sitting around a campfire and you feel like you're just enveloped in this story time because that was what I was used to with bluegrass jams and and becoming a big fan of bluegrass and and jam grass and all of these different genres akin to folk and Americana, which Americana is technically not really a genre, but that's a conversation for a different day. Um, but I I wanted it to feel very much like you're it's just you and a bunch of pals sitting around a fire and and playing together and jamming together over these over these songs.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was saying before we hit record, I was listening to it yesterday uh for this, and uh it was it was like around six. I mean, it wasn't quite magic hour, the sun wasn't no, but here's I am like the person who's like I have my playlists of like songs that I feel like fit for various seasons, and like this song or the the EP to me is uh what I was saying previously if it's like it's it's the end of the day and you're winding down and maybe you're just sitting somewhere uh you know, in your room outside wherever, candlelight, uh there's nature around you, and and you can put the sucker on. Uh and that's not you know a dictatorial. You only have to listen, you only listen to the CP um in that time of day.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, actually, this is golden hour only. Like you're only allowed to listen to it during golden hours. Sorry, guys.
SPEAKER_02Between these hours, uh yeah, the you can put a limit on streaming for that. It's only available in these these times. No, but uh what I was gonna say, uh, or what we were talking about earlier too, is like it helps greatly, at least for me as a as a listener/slash viewer, that you were posting about this uh place in the Shenandoah Valley, which is just beautiful. This is breathtaking. Like it makes me jealous, it makes me think like I'm gonna go record something there if if I didn't have my own thing here. But you can hear I I hear the influence of it, and it's so great of that it's visually represented musically, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and I again I I had told you earlier when you when you first said that to me that that is the highest compliment that you could you could pay the record because that means we did our job, and that means that what I wanted to convey was conveyed, and what I wanted to express is at least being picked up or picked picked, you know, kind of held up to the light.
SPEAKER_02How did you get uh uh locked in with CJ?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, how did you how did that meeting come about?
SPEAKER_01Sure. So I it's been a minute now, but I reached out to him in fall of 2023 um at the recommendation of Gage. Shout out Gage Rhodes again. We should start a tally.
SPEAKER_02What up, Gage?
SPEAKER_01Anyway, uh I knew that Gage had spent some time down at the cabin because it also it's a beautiful recording space. And CJ is the in-house engineer and in-house producer, but a lot of folks, um, up until very recently, would go there just more as a retreat, more as an artist retreat where there's no expectation of recording necessarily, but you go and you just have a minute away, and you have some time to be reflective and you have some time to slow down and just be enamored by the scenery around you. And so Gage had spent some time already. And when I was shopping for studios, so to speak, when I knew that I wanted to get to finally crack down and be disciplined enough to release recorded music, I was shopping around and I just reached out to CJ via email, just cold reach out and connected with him and explained to him like where I had heard of his name and how I how I found Still and Glade. And then we had a couple of phone calls and just the way that he talks about his work and the way that he sort of just cocoons the folks that he works with. It there was something, it was an immediate I felt like my shoulders immediately relaxed, and I had no tension for like the first time ever. If you know me in real life, you know I am wound up real tight most of the time. And so finally, just a few interactions with CJ, and these were just phone calls and just emails. I just felt like I could relax, and it was all just word of mouth through a good friend.
SPEAKER_02That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Uh because you know, God knows you don't want to go into a situation where you you'd listen to the person's stuff before, and then you get in there and you're like, oh no. I don't know how this is gonna be.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I had also I had also done my research and I I looked into other projects that CJ had recorded or produced, and he himself is a musician, and so I kind of did the fangirl thing, and I looked into the bands that he was a part of, and and we had other mutual friends. CJ's originally uh used to live in the Baltimore area, and then him and his wife moved down to the Shenandoah Valley when they bought this cabin and turned it into what it is now. Um, but we had a lot of mutual friends anyway, and so it just felt like it's hard to express this out loud without sounding a little bit woo-woo. But sometimes I just leap first, think later. And I just took a chance by reaching out to CJ. I took a chance by booking time with him, sight unseen. I I just kept taking all of these chances with this innate trust that it was going to work out. And look at me now.
SPEAKER_02Here you are.
SPEAKER_01Kind of like a um a spiritually positive version of fuck around and find out, you know?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, or or I would say like it's it seems like a like an instinctual thing. Yeah in a way, too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, maybe it is.
SPEAKER_02Like you went from your gut.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Still learning how to trust that thing.
SPEAKER_02Uh there's a on the second song, or sorry, no, it's second to last song, Floods.
SPEAKER_01Floods, yeah.
SPEAKER_02There's a voicemail on there.
SPEAKER_01Let's get into it. So um, oh boy, big exhale. Okay. So I had mentioned earlier, sorry, I had mentioned earlier that the record turned into a breakup record. Like it turned accidentally into being like a motif of a breakup kind of thing. And Floods, the song itself, is a very distilled version of the emotions that you experience when you start a romantic relationship from a friendship where you're friends with this person first, then you guys are like, Oh, there's something else here. Let's see about it. And then you form a romantic relationship, and then you realize, oh, we're not meant for each other. But now what? We either have to dig in and try to make the relationship work, or we don't, and we're never gonna be friends again. It was like that kind of a thing. And so that's the emotional arc of the song floods. Um, and you hear it, the the narrator, the protagonist, whatever you want to say, it's like kind of my voice, but the narrating voice is kind of just expressing these doubts about this romantic relationship. And that little voicemail, this is all relevant, I promise. That little voicemail captured at the end, that is the voice of my grandfather. Um, and he's a very important person to me, an Irish immigrant, and has always loved me deeply and supported me greatly. But he loves to tell me all the time that I need to write happier songs. Tells me all of the time that I need to start writing hits, that I need to make pop music, that I need to. I know you're laughing. You're allowed, everyone's allowed to laugh.
SPEAKER_02I am because people tell me the same thing. Yeah, but they ask, don't you have any happy songs?
SPEAKER_01No, exactly. And it happens to me all the time. And people are confused because I present very happy and optimistic, and it's like, okay, well, I still feel extreme, deep emotions that all humans feel. But anyway, I digress. He asks me all the time when I'm gonna write a happy song. And shortly after my first trip down to Sill and Glade in May of 2024, shortly after that, I was going through a really difficult time. Um, parents, close your ears for a second. I started using certain substances to cope with the really hard time that I was having, and it was not making me into a person that I wanted to be, but no one really knew about it. Like it was kind of a secret, or I thought it was a secret. Like some of my closest friends knew, but like I was struggling deep, like with a really big, big transition in my life, and I was just struggling really, really hard, kind of secretly, kind of quietly. And I took some time to just be with family around like July, like 4th of July of 2024. And so I was staying with my grandfather at his house, trying to just distract myself with my loved ones and kind of get through this rough time that I was experiencing. And one morning I come downstairs at my granddad's house, and he sits there with his little notebook at the kitchen table, and he says, Come here, I want to show you something. This man had written a song for me to sing, and it was just this cute little jig. Again, he's Irish, so like Is he musical though? Or he plays or no, he doesn't play, but he is a music appreciator and loves classic Broadway shows and classic movies and has always loved music. He himself just doesn't play, and he comes from a musical family, his brothers all play music as well. Um but he sits me down at the kitchen table and he sings to me this song that he has written, and it's this happy little Irish-sounding jig. And I'm just in tears now, um, and just like just moved and touched by the fact that he's trying so hard to relate to me, but also trying so hard to remind me I can express pain in a happier-sounding way. Um and his song very much was like this cute little rhyming jig, and he sings it for me, and I asked him to sing it again. And without him knowing, I had my phone recording him on the second pass-through. Um, and so anyway, all that to say, when you hear Floods at the very end of the song over this gorgeous outro from Perry on the fiddle, CJ superimposed the latter half of this voice like audio message, uh voice memo over the fiddle outro, and it's my grandfather's voice singing his little Irish Diddy for me, and then we're at the end of it, we're singing it together. Um, and it's just like really it's it's such a profound little tidbit and a really cute anecdote. I know I'm like talking for centuries, but a really cute anecdote is a mutual friend of mine and CJ's was hanging out in the cabin one day, uh helping CJ with some stuff when CJ was doing the final mixes on Floods, and we had finally gotten the voice memo exactly where we wanted it. And this mutual friend of ours broke down in tears and texted me and was like, dude, I just heard this song that you and CJ are working on, and I had the craziest physical reaction to hearing that. He was like, the song is already great, and then you just added that at the end without any, without any pretense, but also without any care for how your audience might feel. Like you're just gonna fuck us up like that. And I was like, Yeah, I guess, but thank you. Like it was it was really high praise. And and CJ, CJ thinks that that's like the winner on the record. Like they're all great, but but that adding just the little like 25-30 seconds of that message from you know, that little song from my grandfather, uh, just really elevated it. And then I played it for my mom. I put it, I put headphones on her, and that's that's her dad. And I put headphones on her and I didn't tell her what was happening, I just told her to listen to this song. And then as soon as she hear her she she hears her dad's voice, she is just in buckets and she is just having she she loved it. She thought it was just so she thought it was so special. And you know, talking about permanence, now I have my grandfather's voice forever on my record, and it's it's always gonna be there, and it's it's always just gonna, you know, it's just gonna be again a perfect little time capsule of of a situation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh talking about winners for the songs, you chose to release Joy Glowing first as a single from the album. What what kind of decision making went into that? Because that's also a hard thing too. When you're like, if you want a single off of an album, EP, whatever, yeah. You know, how do you choose that? So what do you what went into that?
SPEAKER_01Was it an easy pick or I picked Joy Glowing as the single? It's the one that I had been playing live most. I'd been playing it out most, and what's really fun for me is every time I play it, I call up a friend to sit in on it with me, and I bring up the homies to jam on it with me, just like those bluegrass jams I was talking about. And like every time I go to festivals or you know, open mics, like I I play that song because everyone resonates with it, and it's simple enough in its structure, it's like almost pop-based, just in terms of structure, that pretty much anyone can pick up an instrument and and play along, and every single person that jams on it with me brings something completely new and different to the song, and it is no longer mine at that point, it belongs to everyone else, and it It's so freeing and so magical to have a song that that people will connect with, but also love playing on. And so when it came time to pick a single both for the emotional reasons and just the fact that I love it so much as a live, you know, party trick, so to speak, I was like, no brainer. It has to be joy glowing. And it's the song that people most people know by name and they they request it. And yeah, it just felt like that was the one. And it also is um, it's intentionally song number five on the EP. I knew that that was gonna be the finale early, early, early on into the process, because it just kind of perfectly sums up everything else that comes before it. I hope that answers the question.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, 100%. The EP is Peacekeeper.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02This is Bernsey's first EP.
SPEAKER_01First EP. And Peacekeeper. And the title track, uh, Peacekeeper is currently available on Bandcamp. And all the proceeds that I get from Bandcamp from the sale of the single Peacekeeper, the title track, uh, goes to Oh, I'm gonna mess up the acronym. I should have done my research ahead of time. It it goes all everything I get from Bandcamp, first of all, I never keep for myself. The anything I make on Bandcamp, I always donate. And I have two charities that I love to support. And one is American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the other is the I'm messing up the acronym, but it's a Maryland chapter for the prevention of domestic abuse and domestic violence. And I apologize that I can't remember their acronym right now. Um, but yeah, so anyway, if anyone wants to go and listen to Peacekeeper first before the rest of the record comes out, it's on Bandcamp and anything that you possibly can to donate will not go to me. It'll go directly to um helping to fight domestic abuse and domestic violence in the state of Maryland.
SPEAKER_02A wonderful, wonderful cause to give to. Thank you so much, Bernsey.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. I hope that I answered all your questions. I certainly had a really fun time. You were a phenomenal interviewer and a great friend, and so I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for listening to me ramble about my stuff.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Well, and speaking of rambling, check out Bernsey's debut EP, Peacekeeper.
SPEAKER_01Hey y'all, it's Bernsey. I hope that you check out my upcoming EP called Peacekeeper. Recorded, engineered, and produced at Sill and Glade Cabin with CJ Metz, additional engineering from RM Buckeister, and mastering by Matt Leffler-Shulman. And also featuring a bunch of my friends. Too many to count and too many to name. But we're all so proud of this EP and hope that you check it out soon. Love you. Bye.
SPEAKER_00Hi, can hear it in your voice, a joy glowing? I'll try shaving in a drawer. Please help you know it. So you can have it, never scared of it going.