Heartbroken 2019

"Life is but an Empty Dream" is the seventh full length from long-form ambient composer Okada. By pressing play, Gregory Pappas, the man behind the moniker, requires your full attention. Waves of crashing sound swirl around viscus beats and cavernous staccato piano. Sound becomes broken to be reconstructed many times over. This is not the lovesick nor heartbroken Okada we've witnessed before. This is a cathartic, disillusioned, Okada, out the other side, worse for wear but building anew. The proximal six-minute opening to the album expounds destruction and disintegration, chaos and rebirth…

Unbridled joy springs eternal from Halfway Home by Morning. Recorded live off the floor in Nashville, Tennessee, celebrated songwriter Matt Andersen's tenth album collects all the essential elements for a down-home ramble and shoots them through with enough electrifying energy to drive the rock 'n' roll faithful to simmer, shimmy, and shake. Over it's lucky 13 tracks, he explores every facet of his sound-sweat-soaked soul, incendiary rhythm and blues, heartbroken folk, and gritty Americana-and binds them together with palpable heart, as the band leaves everything they've got on the sweet old hardwood of the Southern Ground studio, in the same spot that legends like Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, and Jerry Lee Lewis turned up the volume 'til it couldn't go up anymore. Halfway Home by Morning is the sound of an artist doing what he was born to do.