“After a few cocktails on a flight, I noticed how iridescent the clouds looked with the sun shining off bodies of water underneath. And as the sun went down, how beautiful the different veins and arteries of light and electricity looked from that height. You combine that with the feeling of the plane in its final descent, the feeling of how much faster you are going than the cars on the highway moving in the same direction, and the pure oxygen you are breathing. A moment where everything is literally going your way – that’s as good a reason as any to write a song – in my book.” -Terry Price / Photo Ops
The autumn blaze maple tree, famous as music in Nashville, is a fast grower. Imagine its teeming majesty of red leaves from above one house in the city’s Inglewood neighborhood. You see it ensconced like a controlled flame by rolling hills and winding roads. A familiar pattern lulls you from days into nights in this dreamy park town. You never realized from the ground, under the shade of that tree, how all these beautiful designs in any city keep you sane.
The sweeping vantage points of Photo Ops’ Burns Bright belong first to the quiet of Nashville’s first modern suburb after World War II. Terry Price lived there while perfecting the melodic soft-rock modes that pleased audiences on tour with Camera Obscura and Fences.
Price took this way of seeing to a new home in Los Angeles. Long drives through dimensional vistas ended in his room in Los Feliz where he recorded Burns Bright. When Etta James, Molly Drake, and The Byrds are all touchpoints of sound and silence, what emerges is a gentle homage to the commonalities of lasting influence in pop music, a kind of time-bending presentiment — the moment of tracking in a studio when everyone senses it’s a moment that will be remembered. Reaching through the layer of industry noise in both hallmark cities as we know them from a distance — is this a hit? — Price treasures the visceral experience of making and recognizing music.
The most devout of craftspeople, Price is on a quest toward the merciful essence of recognition when he writes songs; each line discovers a pure element of comfort, calling back to the land and to his musician mother’s love of transcendent melodies. Burns Bright reminds us how those forces are one and the same.
Price’s heroes in music are more than inspirations. To him, they offer examples of how to keep breathing in a culture that discourages total presence. It’s true that moving an open heart through the world comes with constant risk. Looking out at the expanse we all share — really seeing that world — is the practice of Burns Bright, and the special ability that makes Price a songwriter to cherish.
TOUR DATES
3/31 Glendale, AZ – Easy Tiger
4/01 Globe, AZ – GlobeVida
