Last winter, nineteen-year-old Patrick Grace of Saratoga, New York began recording a collection of songs he started writing at the age of fifteen in his father’s basement studio. Originally, the alternative indie project, titled Birds of the Northeast, was a personal endeavor of therapeutic self-expression. Grace found solace in his music as a documentation of negative emotions and a non-confrontational confessional to whom the songs are written. However, his quietly created project quickly became more than he initially intended.
Birds of the Northeast toured this summer in the Upstate area and released a twelve track, self-titled album on September 1st. The entire work, which Grace describes as the musical personification of a mind, was written and recorded solely by him; every intimate vocal track, honest lyric, meandering guitar line, rolling snare part, and whimsical bell jingle can be traced to Grace’s superb musical ability and ingenuity — save two harmony tracks in which his sister, Gigi, lent her vocal talents and a piano line added by engineer, Gary Tash of Pinewood Studios who mastered the album.
Grace described the purpose of Birds of the Northeast, saying, “This project stands for truth and the understanding of who I am – even the darkest and most true parts of me. I wanted it to sound like how I feel, what my head sounds like. I took what was going on emotionally in my head and translated it instrumentally.”
Although Birds of the Northeast is a solo project, Grace performs gigs as a duo, utilizing the guitar and vocal abilities of Houghton freshman, James Johnson. Johnson, a lifelong friend of Grace’s, commented on the new album: “You can tell the amount of time and dedication that was put into this album through the musicianship, multiple harmonies, and immense overlays. In Birds, Patrick conveys an accurate expression of an intricate and striking extension of himself.” He went on to describe Grace as a multitalented person who quickly and easily develops new skills. Grace started playing drums at the age of twelve and three years later picked up guitar. His love and mastery of instruments quickly grew to include bass, mandolin, hand-bells, piano, and xylophone — all of which were used on the album. He cites Arcade Fire, Jack White, Andrew Bird, and Badly Drawn Boy as bands that have heavily influenced his music.
Grace is also involved in two additional, locally known bands. He writes, plays guitar and drums for The Penny Stocks while leading vocally for the band Good Fiction. Johnson concluded, “He’s a monster, he just doesn’t stop. I really admire his adaptability and versatility.”
Due to Grace’s varied musical skills and knowledge, Birds of the Northeast contains creative instrumentation that experiments with traditional musical boundaries and lyrical conceptions. “One Plus One” and “Best (Parts 1 & 2)” stand out as particularly exceptional on both plains. Lines such as, “Stutter through my sentences / please don’t love me any less” and “I can’t become what I am not / don’t just put me on the spot” represent Grace’s straightforward approach to lyric writing. Musically, the serious tone of guitar and snare in “One Plus One” contrasted with quirky xylophone lines meaningfully inform the theme. Throughout the entire album is an ongoing conversation between routine rock instruments and their folksy counterparts. Grace’s concept of “Best (Parts 1 & 2)” was to describe an interaction and then express thoughts concerning it through building instrumentation and layered harmonies. He explained Part 1 as what happened and Part 2 as the introspection of a now churning mind.
Near the end of the album plays “Yana,” a sweet, but refreshingly honest love ballad written about a particularly dear, long distance relationship. The song is full of rich, melodic guitar riffs until the beginning of the bridge when the music is stripped to confused, sweeping chord changes on mandolin and the muffled audio of an actual phone conversation between Grace and his girlfriend, representing the distance between them.
Grace is by no means the first to write meaningful music, but he is the first to write meaningful, beautiful music out of his specific mindset and personal experience with the human condition. His album is not only an honest representation of the interworking of an emotional mind, but also a musically constructed work of art.
Birds of the Northeast offers a salient, emotionally saturated, vulnerable monologue regarding confusion, ambivalence, anxiety, self-hatred, love, and betrayal to the age-old conversation of human experience that is music.
Birds of the Northeast can be purchased on iTunes or listened to for free on Spotify or Sound Cloud.
The group considers themselves to be outside the norm of Houghton bands, since they usually play outside the college and are not a worship band. Most of their following is also outside of the college, since there is a large audience for country music in the surrounding area. The band has done very well recently. They claim that this is due to the fact that there are not many local country bands in the area, and so there is a higher demand for their sound. Their Facebook page has over 350 likes and counting, they have played live gigs in Rushford, Olean and many other nearby towns, and they even competed this past summer in the Country Showdown in Olean and won second place.