Brave the Storm is being represented for sync by In the Groove Music
www.inthegroovemusic.com

Many great songwriters and storytellers are ambivalent about their own muse. They question why one particular artist sharing their perspective should bear any more weight, or provide any more value to humanity than that of anybody else.

Hemingway told us the creative process is labor, a simple question of getting up in the morning and spending time alone with the page. When the well is most dry, the best work will come.

It’s this thread Oregon songwriter Tyler Fortier, performing as Last Year’s Man, picks up with an exhausted tenacity on the opening track of his debut release, “Brave the Storm,” sharing the same name as the album.

Over a gently unfurling acoustic guitar melody, Fortier sings in a dirty-denim tenor, “I know there’s nothing I can say/that you haven’t heard,” with melancholy violin texture, like a shaft of light in the dark.

Soon, Fortier’s loneliness breaks with the addition of Anna Tivel’s backing vocals, raw and pure. “I wonder if it’s the last time any of us will feel such sorrow,” Fortier sings, “It’s difficult to see and getting harder to find something we can reach.”

It’s then that he seems to answer his own question: the purpose of the artist is to grab at the unknowable before it all slips finally, and definitively, from view.

Or perhaps, for Fortier, creativity is a sparrow, mercurial and fleeting, like with “No Eye On the Sparrow,” the lightly bluesy second track on the record.

For Fortier, there’s no traveling through the looking glass. Instead he stands “on the outside,” looking in. There’s a storm a-comin’, according to the songwriter, but he’ll survive. He saw it first; he’s the one that tried to warn us.

Continuing the record’s low-key, late night mood, is “My Own Ghost Town.” This time, steel guitar is the flash of gold at the bottom of the prospector’s pan. Then, in the middle, a shuffling two-step brushed snare and electric guitar quickens the pulse, “I was raised to borrow trouble,” Fortier sings, “a king without a crown, looking for the key to my own ghost town.”

What is a ghost town but the shell of human habitation? Constantly lonely and a little bit searching, that sounds like a place that Fortier might finally call home.

The first love song offering on the album comes with “Guide You Back to Me,” casting through an Americana lens the backbeat of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” like the quickened heartbeat of two young lovers. This time, though, he stands at a place of experience. He knows love is hard-won, just like art.

He sings: “I know that time is not our friend anymore/and our hearts too heavy/I will try to find you through the miles and miles away from home/And when you’re lonely. I will guide you back to me.” It’s then when a heart-felt, two-note keyboard hook sounds almost hopeful.

“Wild, Wild Heart” is up next on the record, containing one of the records most distinct contradictions, with tension up against the simple arrangement of the opening track, guitar, light percussion, and a big expansive Texan sound.

There does seem to be a sort of rebirth in the trio of songs concluding Brave the Storm, with “The Dark End of the Road,” the broadest and most successful grab at something like an anthem. It leads the back half off with a lively guitar hook, Fortier telling an American story of redemption and rebirth.

But this ain’t no Springsteen like ‘n’ share as the title of the song might suggest. Because even when Storm goes big it’s a boil full of relatively few ingredients. The quick step does let some air into the record, and its stronger for it.

In the end, Fortier laments he has miles more to go in the wrong direction. We’ll be the judge of that.

The almost-optimism continues on the album’s only plain-clothed, country-ish-folk love song. There’s also the albums most ornamented production — concluding with the kind of sweetly melancholic orchestral arrangement found in the wind-up sections of Sufjan Stevens.

Fortier’s still searching, though, constantly out of place and out of time. “She’s like a wild river/
Always promising the sea,” he sings. “But she’s never where she’s going/And I’m not where I’m supposed to be.” It’s a rolling tune, full of deep-thinking road trip ruminations.

Nevertheless, Fortier sounds alive and awake than ever. A good love story will do that to you.

The album concludes with the album’s most topical song, “The Valley of Jehoshaphat,” sounding a bit like Iron & Wine. “Your brothers are dying, their bombs are all flying /There’s no time to be a martyr/So grab your guns, your bullets, and your hat/Grab your whiskey and your bible,” Fortier sings, as a montage of news clips and headlines auto-generates in the mind.

The production on the album closer could be the sparsest of the bunch, and it’s here where Fortier, who also produced the album, shows his strengths — it’s about what he hasn’t added as much as it is about what he has, and as Jehoshaphat and the album conclude, you’re left unsettled. Fortier’s out there still searching. I can’t wait to know what he finds.

Moving forward through Brave the Storm is a process of revealing, of layers being peeled back, as electric guitar, organ, and horns are added to Fortier’s resolute vulnerability.

Fortier fully inhabits this sound — classic California songwriters, mysterious Texas vagabonds and truth-speakers, contemporary indie folk artists — but you can’t quite pin him down. Is that him at the back of the bar playing darts? Is that him drinking alone at the bar, rugged and alone?

Is it possible to know Fortier as an artist or does he reveal what he wants to reveal? That’s the game he’s playing on songs like “Wild Wild Heart,” when he sings, “Like the day I am heavy, I am the evening news.” Is there a wink in there among the brooding mood? We’ll never know. We would ask him but “I am water in the air,” is his only response.