MUSIC
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Don't Make Me Explain
Friends, I am pleased to announce the release of my new country/gospel single Don’t Make Me Explain. It is a song I was in the process of writing when the school shooting in Uvalde, TX took place. That tragic event and those preceding it moved me to finish, record and now release it in an effort to somehow, someway, make a difference…and I am asking you to please join me.
All net proceeds from the song purchased from my BandCamp page https://brianmichaeltracy.bandcamp.com/ will go to the Gabby Giffords Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence. https://giffords.org/
Please take a few minutes to get to know Gabby, her remarkable story and work, and consider purchasing the song in an effort to replace the sounds of gun violence with music.
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Drinking My Tomorrows
“Brian Michael Tracy, a poet-turned singer-songwriter from Idyllwild, Calif., has penned an excellent batch of Gram Parsons-influenced country narratives packaged into a clean, austere sound guided by producer Kenneth Gibson. Tracy’s stellar studio band features “jazzgrass” pioneer Barnaby Finch on piano and Marty Rifkin on pedal steel guitar, an instrument he previously showcased while touring with Bruce Springsteen in support of the Boss’s contagious 2006 Pete Seeger tribute, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.” But the songs at their core could be added to the canon of recent recordings by the likes of Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, and Hayes Carll.” –Bruce Fessier
POETRY & MUSIC
The Mystical Prism of Being
Brian’s work, The Mystical Prism of Being, is a fifteen poem chapbook and accompanying CD where he worked with a group of extremely talented musicians to produce a beautiful album that illustrates the classic cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
The CD juxtaposes Brian’s poems with a variety of beloved songs including The Beatles’ “Across the Universe,” Sting’s “Sister Moon,” Van Morrison’s “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart,” and The Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace”. It is a continuous braiding of poem and song resulting in poetry like you have never heard it before.
Midnight Tea
Experience the time honored tradition of storytelling with poet Brian Michael Tracy and musicians Andy Hill and Renee Safier as elegant, desriptive poems are woven around and between beautifully rendered songs giving both the music and poetry heightened meaning and emotion. Follow along as their stories walk you through the landscapes of love, loss, freedom and redemption. Truly a unique entertainment experience.
“Midnight Tea is a unique piece of Americana with few equals that will not soon be replicated.” –Mark S. Tucker
“Brian Michael Tracy has teamed with singer-songwriters Andy Hill and Renee Safier and together recorded Midnight Tea, a CD that alternates musical selection and spoken word. The works are paired, often thematically, and the result sheds new light on the creation and collaboration process.” –Bondo Wyszpolsk
Blackbird Ballads: Poetry & Music in Three Acts
Poet Brian Michael Tracy’s second CD entitled Blackbird Ballads: Poetry & Music in Three Actsi s inspired, in part, by Robert Bly’s book Leaping Poetry. Tracy mixes deep image poetry with an array of folk/rock songs spanning five decades (1967 – 2004) and forges them into a compelling poetic narrative for the listener.
POETRY
Opaque Traveler: A Dream Sequence in Verse
“Brian Tracy’s Opaque Traveler takes us upon a journey across nocturnal landscapes that have been sculpted by myth and painted by dream. This album of dreams is also a book of mirrors, and in each reflection we see ourselves reckoning both the desires and experiences of our lives. To follow this traveler’s path, we are given to understand, is to seek to be changed.” — David St. John, author of Study for the World’s Body and The Auroras.
The Distance Between Shores
Brian Tracy’s exquisite poems evoke those “ghostlier demarcations” summoned by Wallace Stevens, another poet for whom the sea is muse. Because Tracy is a poet of powerful restraint and beautiful nuance, The Distance Between Shores is a book of delicately suspended, liminal spaces, spaces in which one hears whispers from the other world as well as “the howl and hunger” of this one. — Gail Wronsky, author of Poems for Infidels and Dying for Beauty.
Like Basho’s elliptical vision of nature as truth, Brian Tracy’s wonderful debut, Driving With Dante, pares down what it sees, placing the speaker somewhere “between the seduction of the horizon / and a strange devotion to shore”; all the while paying homage to time’s landscape, each “invisible kingdom” in our lives. Here, even when death comes from “the hands of men riding their fathers’ horses” the poet aptly and beautifully reminds us that we must, every day, “let gravity pass through our hearts into memory / into music.” – Elena Karina Byrne, author of The Flammable Bird and Masque.