Over the course of six albums, indie folksinger Eliot Bronson has created his own brand of atmospheric American roots music. He’s an award winner. A road warrior with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. An internationally-renowned songwriter with a voice that swoons and sweeps, making fans out of everyone from his hometown newspaper, The Baltimore Sun —who championed Bronson from the very start, hailing him as “a folk singing wunderkind” back when he was still playing local coffeeshops — to Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb, whose work on 2014’s Eliot Bronson and 2017’s James placed Bronson on the same client roster as
heartfelt songwriters like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton.
Talking To Myself marks the most meditative, melodic album of his career, with sparse soundscapes that are laced with acoustic guitar, light touches of keyboard, and clouds of reverb. When Eliot’s voice enters each song, it’s like sunlight piercing its way through the fog. “There’s a little bit of pedal steel, a little bit of bass, and a little bit of electric guitar,” he explains. “Other than that, it’s just me and Damon.”
He’s talking about Damon Moon, the Atlanta-area producer best known for his work with regional indie rock bands. “Damon usually makes records with louder bands,” Eliot says, “and that was interesting to me. I wanted to work with someone who had a different sensibility than I did. He brought a new atmosphere to the album. Instead of playing bass on a song, we’d use a Moog. Instead of playing a shaker, we’d use a brush on the side of a tambourine. We wanted to get outside the box of what an Americana folk singer is supposed to sound like.”
The result is a 10-song showcase of spacey dream-folk, with Eliot Bronson pulling triple-duty as a singer, songwriter, and co-producer. On his previous record, Empty Spaces, he wrote about the messy end of a decade-long romance and the start of something new. Portions of Talking To Myself serve as an epilogue to that story, with songs like “From Rabun Gap” and “Are You Still Mean” measuring the distance between past heartbreak and present resilience. Elsewhere, Talking To Myself finds Eliot taking stock of the world around him, turning his personal
experience into universal songs about the feelings we all share.
Talking To Myself is an album that balances mood and melody, intimacy and atmosphere, grounded songwriting and astral, ambient arrangements. For a songwriter who’s always dealt with the grey area between genres — or, he puts it, “the in-between colors that we don’t really have words for” — it’s the next chapter in a story that continues to unfold.
