The Beat with Kevin Oliver: Review of Automata - Single Sparrow

Single Sparrow

Automata

Self-released

Single Sparrow is the band moniker of Charleston, SC musician Patrick Leitner, and this new album is truly a one-man project–he plays every note, wrote every song, recorded, mixed, and mastered the final product himself. You’d never know it from listening, however, as the playing is seamless, and the production is spotlessly clean. 

Despite the forced sterility of its creation in a kind of artistic bubble, this is not a soulless, automated performance. Leitner has one of those world-weary vocal styles, resigned but still possessing an intensity that belies the non-demonstrative singing. It’s most effective on the pastoral rock of “Peaks and Valleys,” for example, where a loping beat echoes Neil Young as Leitner sings: 

“Take me to the Atlantic Ocean, let me feel the waves

Running over sandy shores that weren’t here yesterday

If I try to hold on tight it still washes away

And time is running out on me in much the same way” 

The sense of loss is palpable in the song’s metaphor for change, something that the narrator sounds at peace with, if not in agreement to it happening. 

There are stories here from Leitner’s own life–”Tiny Metronome” is a reference to his daughter. He draws from history and culture as well, with “Centralia” taken from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania and “Happy Accidents,” pulled from the story of famous still life painter Bob Ross. It’s the songs that invite more universal interpretations, however, that pull one inside this digital audio world. 

The emotional depth of Leitner’s writing rewards repeat listens, and this album will sink into your consciousness in all the best ways, with lines standing out at different moments. This week it might be the distillation of “impostor syndrome” unworthiness into the words of “A Reflection of the Moon,” as he sings over a jittery percussive track and a single acoustic guitar, “I am a ballad out of tune, a perfect harmony too soon, or the reflection of the moon; a copy of something true.” Next week, it will shift to “Nothing On the News Tonight” and its examination of relationships in a dystopian world; “The apocalypse is over now, just listening still to the static; something in the way you hold my hand that slows down time …”  

Whatever part of Automata connects with an individual listener, the original concept of AI that can think like humans may have been achieved here by Leitner, accidentally or not. The solitary man in a studio created something that connects almost instantly with other humans, through the miracle of digital tech. 

Kevin Oliver's THE BEAT: Caught Up In a Feeling--The Runout and Jeff Gregory Build Community Around Music

“We discovered that we like eating, and we like drinking, and we like making music, preferably all at the same time,” - Jeff Gregory

For many people the ongoing pandemic has been a rollercoaster ride, but for Jeff Gregory and his band The Runout it was the catalyst for a creative community which birthed the band’s latest album With Your Eyes Closed. Early on, as artists found their footing online with live streaming to replace live in-person shows, Gregory and his wife Kelley hit upon a simple format of the two of them, a guitar and occasional piano, repeated on Wednesday nights, that resonated with them and a core group of friends and fans.  

“The pandemic really had us down, so Kelley and I found something to do to make ourselves happy and remember what singing together in high school was like,” Jeff Gregory says. 

The Runout was already a band with a couple recording sessions and a first album out, along with a number of live shows featuring an evolving lineup that currently includes Mike Scarboro on drums, Moses Andrews on bass guitar, keyboards, and organ, and Chris Compton on electric guitar alongside Jeff and Kelley Gregory. But as the pandemic dragged on and Gregory took some soul-searching, nonmusical personal time, the community drew him back in, he says.

“Thank God for Chris Compton, Patrick Leitner, Lang Owen, all of those guys asked me to get involved on their projects, just a song here and there,” Gregory says. “It spurred me on to wanting to do music again myself.” 

The community that gathered around the Gregorys shared one crucial thing, and, surprisingly, it wasn’t music–it was food. 

“We discovered that we like eating, and we like drinking, and we like making music, preferably all at the same time,” Gregory says. “It sounds silly, but a lesson we’ve learned is that when you have friendship, and good vibes, then you can have some creativity and exploration in what you’re doing.” 

The musical result of this camaraderie was The Runout’s latest album With Your Eyes Closed. The record pulls together the intimate feeling of those livestream nights with an expanded lineup that allows for full band arrangements. The tracks progress through deceptively feel-good anthems such as the bouncy Americana-esque opener, “Feelings,” and more raucous, rocking rave-ups like “Coffee and Weed.” Gregory also delves into deeper territory on tracks like the ethereal “Crooked Canyon,” a metaphorical journey to the center of one’s psyche that’s equal parts terrifying and glorious in its imagery.  

Gregory has that rarest of qualities–the ability to turn a clever phrase, but also imbue its delivery with raw, honest emotion that connects on a deeper level than the average pop song. The centerpiece of the album is “Give Up,” an irresistible tune that began life on those now long-ago livestreams with just Jeff and Kelly harmonizing to an acoustic guitar. The album version adds shimmering electric guitar to the natural connection their voices make on lyrics that anyone in a long-term  relationship can relate to: “I’ve been wanting to give up, I’ve been thinking it through…it seems I need a few more hours down this road with you.”  

Those few more hours have become months now, in pandemic times. In lieu of a club gig for the album release, The Runout staged a mini-festival they dubbed “Stump Fire Fest” at a friend’s property. They invited a hundred of their fans and friends to come celebrate outdoors with them, a culmination of the community that had sustained the band to that point.

“We’re thankful for that community,” Gregory says now. “We weren’t really aware of it until that night–I think it was the result of the pandemic filtering out everything that didn’t matter, and the music was what was left.” 

The Stump Fire Fest may have set an unrepeatable precedent; in addition to the Runout, several other bands played on a small stage built just for the night, poet Al Black read between sets, and Dick Moons and his drum circle formed up around a nearby campfire as participants ate, drank, and moved between the different moving parts of the evening.  

“It really crossed scenes and generations,” Gregory says of the festival. “It wrapped up what had been a really meaningful time of making the record, too–Hanging out with Chris Compton, Sean Thomson, Patrick Leitner, Moses Andrews, that meant more to me than I realized at the time.” 

It’s the mentality of helping others, Gregory concludes, that has to survive the pandemic.

“People are wondering what’s going on in the world right now, and the answer is that nobody knows,” He says, “So what must our response be? It has to be art.”