"While You Were Slumbering" by Joseph Decosimo, Out Today!

Today we release this masterful work into the world and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Sending out a hearty congratulations to Joseph and everyone involved in bringing this beauty to life.

Read below to dive into the record’s mythos, ethos, logos, and pathos:

“Turn the FM dial as the sun is setting on a Saturday evening. Hear Jimmy Martin’s song about his old coondog Pete come through the speaker. Take a walk in the garden, survey the potatoes and the beans. Sit down at the dinner table—beans, cornbread, onion, ham, milk. Later, a porch door smacks. Music floats out beyond the porch into the dark of a summer night.

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This music is about nourishment. It’s about the idea that good old things—not the burdensome stuff—can still sustain us and fill us. Maybe, in the best of circumstances, it can even help us to heal or at least connect with a healing impulse. Or maybe it just opens a clearing where we can rest a bit. 

I gleaned the phrase while you were slumbering from an old field recording of Retta Spradlin singing “Man of Constant Sorrow.” She ends her haunting rendition with the line: “Oh, while you were sleeping, while you were slumbering, I am sleeping in the clay.” That line has stuck with me. The last few years have felt a bit like a dream, haven’t they? The act of slumbering 

As we slumber our minds construct new worlds from fragments of experience. These dream worlds can be familiar or unfamiliar. Sometimes they’re both at once. Slumbering is a time of inactivity: We rest in oblivion as the world moves ahead in its way, inflicting fresh wounds and generating new sources of wonder.

Sometimes my voice cracks when I sing Troubles. It’s happened a few times. In the midst of July 2020, as I was watching the world stagger through the pandemic and also watching mental illness ravage someone dear to me, I sat on the porch singing this old song. It was a dark, drizzly, humid North Carolina night. As I sang, a lump formed in my throat. I didn’t see it coming, but suddenly I couldn’t get the words out. I tried to keep it together, but it couldn’t be kept together. My voice broke. Tears followed. That feeling still creeps in sometimes. At my first show with an audience once things opened up and then again just a month ago, I mumbled through a whole verse as I tried to swallow that lump down. And it still surprises me. This seemingly simple song (of course, the stuff that seems simple is usually the deep stuff), sung by Virgil Anderson, a great player from the mountain range where I grew up in Tennessee, still does work in the world, even if it’s just on me. It’s come to feel as much like a prayer as a song: Trouble can’t last always. Amen. 

Hopefully, in sitting with this recording, the music will do some work on you too. We’ve been patient with it, letting it unfurl and swirl into its current form. Rather than distant interpretations of exotic repertoire, these are pieces that emerge from relationships to the original sources and to the friends who’ve lent their creativity to the project. The sense of responsibility and care that accompanies friendship not only guides the repertoire, but it also inspired us.”

- Joseph

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