Townsends Solitaire Glad To Be Alive Americana UK [Video]

Reflections of grief and loss enlivened with classical accompaniment.

Townsend’s Solitaire is a Seattle chamber-folk sextuplet brought together by Bobby Odle. Odle is a bi-polar singer-songwriter and, on ‘Glad To Be Alive’, he set out to produce a meditation on two culturally stigmatized topics that have impacted greatly on his life – grief and suicidal ideation.

To this end Odle has surrounded himself with quite an ensemble of like-minded musicians of classical persuasion so, as well as featuring his distinctive vocals, the album features piano, flute, violin, cello, clarinet and ocarina. Not your run-of-the-mill Americana line-up perhaps but engaging just the same.

The album was recorded live to tape and the rawness this gives to some tracks seems a perfect match for the searingly honest and affecting themes at play here. Odle lost his brother to cancer when he was 13 and on the sparse ‘Little Brothers’with its faint hiss of tape, the sound of fingers moving over guitar strings and …