Jacob Brodovsky Is Still Trying
On Tell The Kids We Tried, the singer-songwriter wrestles with isolation and the quiet hope of feeling something at all.
By Myles Tiessen
- Published on
The record, Brodovsky tells RANGE over a video call from his home studio, lives in a similar purgatory. It takes the anxiety and dread of the socio-economic and environmental precarity of these times and internalizes that pressure. It’s a record that analyzes and probes the scariest parts of who we are as friends, parents and loved ones within a time and place that seems desperately intent on pulling us apart, isolating us in our own ugly conditions.
Over indie-folk picking and sharp, diaristic lyrics, Tell The Kids We Tried merges the worlds of anthemic alternative indie production and the muted intimacy of tender folk. Throughout the record, Brodovsky toys with single-take impulsivity, backed by producers MOONRIIVR, who helped record the album over six days at Collector Studio in Winnipeg.
With vocal support from the likes of Charlotte Cornfield and local singer-songwriters Dominique Adams and Taylor Jackson, the entirety of Tell The Kids We Tried embraces and celebrates the glorious and painful communicative power of vocal melodies.
Much of the record, he says, comes from an era of personal instability. Brodovsky was co-executive director of a Jewish summer camp, but his vocal and moral support for Palestine forced him to walk away from a community that had been integral to his life.
“I think my subconscious was kind of reading the writing on the wall in the year leading up to that happening, and that’s when I wrote a lot of these songs, sort of like sensing the temperature being sort of turned up.”
Throughout Tell The Kids We Tried, Brodovsky seeks understanding in a time of no resolutions and a home while searching for community. “Nothing’s really being resolved,” he says of the heavily narrative-driven songs. “Like, there’s no good endings or good beginnings.”
Throughout many of the songs, connection seems to exist only in theory. Brodovsky scans his environment—whether it be a couple having a bad date at a local restaurant or an isolated streetlight in winter—for meaning, but only further dissociates from himself.
“Some of my friends get help / some get stoned / It’s hard to look behind / It’s hard to live alone / It’s hard to feel the time wear down your bones,” he sings on “Lack Thereof.” It’s a song that most notably takes on the burdens of the world around Brodovsky and, in desperate regret, cries out over the inability to act.
“Watch them mark our indifference as they cage more kids / Find my burnt out persistence / Still clenching my fist about our greed for betraying all the people we love,” he sings near the end of the song.
In many moments throughout Tell The Kids We Tried, the songs embrace Brodovsky’s self-deprecating nature. An eternally humble artist, Brodovsky says, “If you’re gonna make art for people to consume, there has to be that built-in humility and, like, built-in lack of ego.”
“I don’t think anyone needs to hear necessarily, like, the ruminations of another white guy on the state of the world… So it’s like, if I’m going to be spending time and energy on trying to flesh that out, it kind of has to be through the lens of my own lived experience. Otherwise, it feels just kind of performative,” he says.
That tension between holding his own experience and the experience of the world carries with it all the burdens of angst and disdain, but, in its own way, Tell The Kids We Tried is also deeply forgiving and empathetic.
“Once the flowers wilt and the lakes run dry / Once it’s hard to breathe beneath the blanket of a smoky sky,” Brodovsky sings on “Kids.” “Will you tell the kids we tried?”
The release—or, rather, allowing oneself to be unburdened by social and parental pressures—is what Brodovsky says is the “thesis of the whole record.”
“It’s not like we’re not trying, we just don’t necessarily know how to try. And we don’t know how to not prioritize our own ridiculous needs.”
Now a father of two, Brodovsky emphasizes the importance of his kids seeing a community around them. “It’s important to me and my partner to, like, preserve and protect our community and, like, feed it and give back to it. I think that’s, like, a really important thing to raise children thinking.”
If nothing else, Tell The Kids We Tried is a map for his children. Behind all the dread is a hidden optimism, and to Brodovsky, in moments where destitution and paralysis feel like common enough friends, feeling something—anything—is the first step towards hope.
“If anyone gets anything at all out of [the album], whether that’s, like, escape or comfort or frustration or rage, if it does anything for you at all, to me, that’s a victory.”
As he sings on the track “Winters”: “Surviving’s enough.”
By Glenn Alderson
To celebrate the release of Nouveaux Langages, we asked the artists who helped shape her new double album to ask the questions.
By Sofia Dawson
Daughter From Hell finds the songstress twisting the knife deeper.
By Sebastian Buzzalino
The Vernon quartet’s new album Rat Bastard is a fiercely alive mix of post-punk, dub, techno and basement-show energy.
By Kenna Clifford
Driven by the centuries-old sound of the shamisen, the Berlin-based quintet is deconstructing Japanese folk music and rebuilding it for new audiences around the world.
By Izzy Petraglia
The decade-spanning pop star held an immersive, phone-free experience for devout listeners to celebrate her new album, Music, Fashion, Film.
By Neil Jefferies
Alone Together finds the New York trio navigating grief, fatherhood and the uneasy distance between trust and suspicion.
By Sebastian Buzzalino
The Vancouver punk band bottle their chaotic live energy into a blistering black-and-white session filmed at Phony! Records.
By Cam Delisle
Paring alt-R&B back to its foundations, new avatar gives equal weight to songwriting, distance, and one of the genre's defining voices.
By Sophia Pan
Fire From the Hip finds the actor and musician taking control of his art – even if he can’t control who follows him there.
By Madeline Lines
The “broken R&B” artist talks creative side quests, lucid dreams and the collective power behind her long-awaited debut album, POWER HOUSE.
