Raised in New York State, Briane Dunne was drawn to music with a singular devotion from an early age. He picked up the guitar first, later adding piano and voice to his repertoire as he fell in love with kind of songwriters who paired muscular rock and roll with raw, literate self-examination. After graduating college he relocated to Brooklyn to pursue music full time and began crisscrossing the country on tour, performing hundreds of shows a year and building up a dedicated fanbase the old fashioned way. He released a pair of acclaimed albums—2015’s ‘Songs From The Hive’ and 2017’s ‘Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements’—that garnered frequent airplay on SiriusXM and helped land him dates with everyone from Cat Power and Dylan LeBlanc to Rosanne Cash and Lee Ann Womack alongside high profile spots on Cayamo and NPR’s Mountain Stage.
Dunne’s latest album, ‘Selling Things’ is peppered with personal revelations, but Dunne often wraps his insights in a sardonic humor that manages to never take itself too seriously. He faces down doubt and disappointment head on, learning to make peace with uncertainty and find catharsis in acceptance. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer/mixer/engineer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Caroline Rose), the collection is a dark and dreamy meditation on the nature of fulfillment, one that balances the personal and political as it contemplates an impending apocalypse that feels more literal and less metaphorical with each passing day.
Dunne writes with a cinematic eye for detail here, offering up fully fleshed out character studies and immersive vignettes that capture the kind of small, seemingly inconsequential moments that only later reveal their profound and lasting impacts. It’s an approach that calls to mind everything from Jackson Browne and Tom Waits to Jonathan Richman and Chrissie Hynde, and the result is a blend of black humor and probing introspection that sounds at once vintage and modern, familiar and foreign, hopeful and fatalistic.