OUR FIRST CURATED CONCERT IN 2.5 YEARS!!!
You're Going to Die Presents…
LET IT MOVE YOU:
The Feelings Parade Album Release Show
w/special guests
The Singer & the Songwriter
& the SF Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin
Show at 8pm
@
Freight & Salvage
2020 Addison Street
Berkeley, CA 94704
$20 ADV - $24 DOOR
TICKETS: https://secure.thefreight.org/11675/the-feelings-parade
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The Feelings Parade
Let It Move You
“What we did find is something that we don’t know how old or new it is – about .. about the size of a marble – you’ve got – there’s something in your - in your brain.”
In February of 2020, songwriters Morgan Bolender and Scott Ferreter entered a studio to record the heart of their first proper studio album as The Feelings Parade.
The global Covid-19 pandemic curtailed some of that progress, though the duo kept recording at home and where it was distant and safe. With the van loaded up and their home studio ready to be moved for the eighth time — roughly about a week before the album was finished — Morgan had an unexpected 8-minute seizure, which led to brain surgery. From there, Morgan (who couldn’t have visitors in the hospital) sent recorded updates by the doctor to Scott, who was parked outside in the van. Those recordings soon became part of the larger framework of the duo’s much-delayed but eagerly awaited debut release, Let It Move You.
Fortunately, the bones of this remarkable debut were laid down just before the pandemic, and some songs date back a few years; that said, the record is remarkably consistent and present, even as new ideas, collaborators and Morgan’s spoken-word updates were added, along with voicemails from friends and a powerful pre-surgery pep talk voicemail from Scott. These communications, initially private, were a way for Morgan to feel support through an impossibly hard time.
Let It Move You is a wonderfully diverse record, from the slow, beautiful harmonic build-up of album opener “The Tides” to the melancholy (and horns) that define “In Defense of Sadness.” From there, you’ll see that honesty and struggle at work: There’s both a song about the pains of dealing with grief (“Time for Tea”) and finding strength in the face of challenge (“Strongest I Ever Felt,” a short interlude composed around one of Morgan’s delirious post-brain-surgery voice memo ramblings).
The record can be emotionally raw; as well, the live performances of The Feelings Parade feel cathartic. “Every word we sing we’ve poured over; it has to ring true,” says Scott. “And I think with this record, a lot of the feeling is — no wonder you’re hurting. It’s been unsafe to feel your feelings, from the time you were born. It’s about empathy. Let’s hurt together.”
The duo sometimes get labeled as West Coast folk, but that’s a fairly limited term. It’s more about two excellent songwriters, working both in tandem and with a big group of friends, to create harmony-rich music that’s grounded in familiar instruments but crosses over traditional categories — with a painfully raw lyrical honesty at the forefront. “Production-wise, we were inspired by Latin American Magical Realism, where there’s a steady, believable and reliable world inside of which inexplicably magical occurrences happen,” says Scott, who also, in a lighthearted moment, also accurately describes their music as “heartfelt and groovy.”
If you want to really sum up The Feeling Parade, sit down with “A Lot to Hold,” the song where you can find the line that makes up the album’s title. “That song really came into its own our first few times performing it inside of prisons (Marion Correctional Institute and San Quentin) as part of Alive Inside, the You’re Going to Die project that we’re both a part of,” says Scott. “We knew that if the song didn’t ring true in that context, then it wasn’t doing its job.”
Adds Morgan: “There’s this line in the song, where we’re trying to describe the pain of living in this modern world: ‘The pain in your heart, that’s the truth moving through. Will you stomp it down, or let it move you?’ It’s about us having the choice to look away, to repress the things that hurt us. Instead, for us, it’s about being moved by those things in the direction of justice, equity and healing–it’s about letting that pain animate us toward creating a world that works for all of us.”The Feelings Parade is a movement as much as it is a band. Led by songwriters Morgan Bolender and Scott Ferreter, the project has developed a loyal following of diehard “Feelers" who come as much for the poetic songwriting, tight harmonies, and rich textures as they do to drop into their own tender human hearts in a space of collective radical vulnerability. The unwavering honesty of their songs and their undefended onstage presence create an atmosphere that is equally reverent to the ache, the challenge, and the pleasure of being human. On more than one occasion, fans have said that Feelings Parade shows are “better than therapy.”
Their music has brought them on multiple national US tours and all over Europe--everywhere from grand music halls to prisons; from music festivals to the bedsides of hospice patients--and has had them sharing stages with like-hearted musicians such as Glen Hansard, Mirah, Josiah Johnson (The Head and The Heart), Ayla Nereo, Mount Eerie, Rainbow Girls, John Craigie, Whiskerman, and MaMuse. They regularly get asked to make an entire album of their unscripted, often hilarious, and vulnerable onstage banter. The project has become a central part of the burgeoning West Coast folk scene, and whether they’re playing as a duo or with their sexy 7-piece band, The Feelings Parade are known for being rare musical truth-tellers who choose lay it all out, both inside and outside of the songs.
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The Singer and The Songwriter is the musical duo of queer-mixed-race-Mexican-American vocalist/songwriter Rachel Garcia and Vietnamese-American guitarist/songwriter Thu Tran. “The duo creates soft melodic songs, that could just as easily exist as poems. Beautiful, and full of sound and emotion” (Playlist Play) while their multi-cultural backgrounds bring depth and diversity to the rich traditions of folk, jazz and blues music; genres they navigate between with ease and fluidity.
The duo has been captivating audiences across the US with their intimate live shows at house concerts, theaters, listening rooms, and coffeehouses. At times heartbreaking and at times hilarious, their performances are open-hearted conversations with the audience where they share their stories full of honesty, humor and wit, while delivering their songs with riveting, economical precision. Their live shows are filled with “inimitable storytelling, musical mastery, and soul-baring honesty. These two are truly a gift.” (High Plains Public Radio) They were named a finalist in the 2022 Grassy Hill New Folk Song Competition. They have released 3 critically-acclaimed albums, and are currently preparing to release their next full-length album.
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Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of “Someone’s Dead Already”, “Heaven Is All Goodbyes”, “Waiting Behind Tornados for Food”, and “Blood on the Fog”. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.