A few days before indie-pop singer-songwriter Michael Flynn performed in the 2021 NewSong Music Songwriting Competition finals, he learned that his father had mere months to live. Flynn dearly wanted to win the competition so that he could share some good news with his dad — and that’s exactly what happened.As part of his grand prize, Flynn (known musically as Slow Runner) was invited to record an album at Citizen Studios, resulting in the deftly crafted, emotional, and ultimately hope-infused Yesterday Don’t Fail Me Now, set for release on the NewSong Recordings label on all streaming platforms on October 11, 2024.
An album release show will take place at Citizen Vinyl in Asheville, NC — where the record was recorded and pressed — also on October 11. Show info here.
The second single, “Farthest Star,” is out now on all streaming platforms.
Despite being mostly written during the five month period that Flynn’s father lived with (and died from) inoperable pancreatic cancer, the songs on YDFMN are only occasionally explicit in their funereal inspiration. While soaking up time with and helping to care for his dad, “There was a lot of time for thinking about weighty things, death and time and love that pushes up against the limits of reality,” Flynn says. “And there was a lot of time for writing, going over lyrics in my head or picking out melodies on the old upright piano I learned to play on as a boy.”
YDFMN is a collection of pop songs that touch on feelings that transcend any specific loss, Flynn says. “Everybody has something they dread facing, or something they wish for, despite long odds, or someone they want to splash in a fountain with.”
When it came time to record the songs at Citizen Studios in Asheville, Flynn and co-producer Gar Ragland tried to fully realize what, at the time, felt like an ambitious and eclectic palette of beautiful sounds — bass clarinet, mandolin, congas, vocoder, and strings. Every creative decision was made with a goal of drawing as short a line as possible between the listener and the emotion the song was trying to evoke. There was a conscious effort to recklessly blend organic instruments with samples and electronic instruments with no thought about what might be “authentic” or fit in a certain genre. Favors were called in and friends from Asheville, New York, Nashville and elsewhere were cajoled into helping.
“Making the record was an essential part of grieving for me,” says Flynn. “It wasn’t just a recording, it was a barn-raising. It was an outrageous act of spiritual defiance, building something joyful on the ashes of a life well lived and deeply missed. The sound of searching for and cherishing what is essential even while it’s slipping through your fingers.
Interested in entering this year’s NewSong Music performance & Songwriting Competition, presented by Citizen Vinyl? Click here to submit your original songs.
