The Singer and The Songwriter deliver a spiritually and emotionally haunting experience with their stunning and supernaturally beautiful new album Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
After a decade in the making, the award-winning queer, mixed-race folk duo of Rachel Garcia and Thu Tran share a personal collection of songs inspired by grief, late-stage capitalism, and their enduring 18-year friendship.
Their fifth studio release and third full-length album, Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future is a set of true stories written over years of touring, across thousands of miles of open highway, and amidst the duo’s own personal and artistic growth. A sign inspired the album’s title in the window of an abandoned storefront in McDermott, NV. The evocative set of words punctuated by their enigmatic exclamation points perfectly encapsulated the themes on this record. The album’s lyrics tell stories of heartbreak, loss, dreams for a future that may never arrive, the turmoil of the oppressive systems that hold us in place, and the intimate moments of hope and humanity that get us through. Four instrumental interludes entitled, Dreams!, The Dead!, Ghost! and Future respectively, divide the album into chapters, to create a listening experience that mirrors the passing of seasons.
The lead single, Sound & Light, was written almost a decade ago, in 2016. It started, as so many of the duo’s songs do, as a poem written by Rachel. The poem was an account of a formative and traumatic loss that Rachel experienced when she was 18. She handed the poem to Thu who translated it into a narrative song, with the guitar mimicking the beat of train wheels, and the chorus incorporating a sense of time standing still.
As the duo relentlessly toured the U.S. playing intimate house concerts, Sound & Light became a staple of their show, often serving as the emotional anchor to share vulnerably about grief and personal loss. As a result, audience members frequently approach the duo after shows to share about the losses in their own lives, and how they resonate and connect with this song.
The inciting idea for their followup single, The Work, was a 2017 story in the Washington Post called The New Reality of Old Age in America by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan. The long-form story profiles several workampers, folks of retirement age in the U.S. who shed their homes and belongings and purchase RVs to travel and find seasonal work.
Thu’s personal connection to this story stemmed from watching his father, a Vietnamese immigrant, run a landscaping business for 30 years. He witnessed first-hand how the daily physical labor took a toll on his father’s body, while the financial stress of being unable to afford a comfortable retirement left his parents in a constant state of anxiety. The relentless, driving rhythm of the song and chant-like, repetitive chorus were written to mirror the never-ending, insatiable machine of capitalism.
Musically, this is the only lyrical song on the record that is in a minor key. The duo created the song as a modern-day labor anthem, a reflection on the financial and emotional struggles of the working class in late-stage capitalism.
The third single Over Easy is an ode to ambiguous grief, memory, forgiveness, and breakfast. The lyrics of the song reflect upon Rachel’s complicated relationship with her estranged father and recall memories as vivid vignettes that take place in the kitchen. This song’s creation is an example of the duo’s current working style, with lyrics written by Rachel as a fragmented collage. These fragments are put together into a melodic structure by Thu, and then the song is honed and edited as a whole by both writers.
The song’s waltzing tempo, lilting melody, and poetic lyricism earned the duo a spot as finalists in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s NewFolk Competition in 2022, a prestigious honor previously held by the likes of Adrianne Lenker, Anna Tivel and Lucinda Williams, just to name a few. The duo wanted to use magical realism in the lyrics to instill the emotionality of ambiguous grief into otherwise mundane-seeming details, like making breakfast.
You Take Such Good Care of Me is the album’s final single, a meditation on love as an ongoing series of tangible, everyday actions. Having been friends for 18 years and bandmates for 15 of those years, this song and album is a testament to Rachel and Thu’s deep and enduring artistic connection. The song’s universal message of love on the smallest scale is also a depiction of the very real ways in which the two have supported one another through their years of working and creating together. The song’s spare arrangement highlights the duo’s signature sound: a conversation between the voice and the guitar, unhurried, delicate and deliberate.
The album was recorded over 10 days at New Monkey Studio, formerly the late Elliott Smith’s studio, and tracked with one of the remaining original vintage 1970’s Trident Triad A-Range consoles to give it a warm, timeless sound.
The musical partnership of Garcia and Tran is rooted in a deep, long-standing friendship. For over 15 years, they have collaborated in creating a singular artistic voice, blending detailed, exacting poetry and evocative musicality. Their songs tell the stories of real people, exploring themes of death, grief, and their experiences of the world from their queer, BIPOC, multi-racial identities. Their deep connection weaves through their music and performances, creating an intimacy which they share with their audiences.
Rachel and Thu’s respective identities as queer mixed-race-Mexican-American and first-generation-Vietnamese-American inform the inclusionary, modernist perspective of their lyrics, which provide smart commentary on social attitudes, while their music and melodies cut across decades of classic American song forms, bending and blending genres to produce a unique sound with a fresh, clever and distinct approach to the classic traditions of folk and Americana.
Listen to Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future below, watch some of The Singer and The Songwriter’s latest videos above, and join them on their website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
