American producer and songwriter Nelson Kempf will be releasing his debut album Family Dollar in a month, and has today shared a new single from it. The track, “Sweetness & Strife”, revisits a crux point in Kempf’s life, as he explains:
“‘Sweetness & Strife’ was written when we were preparing to leave Nashville. It is a literal reminiscence of our time there. It was the Summer of 2015. We found out we were having another child and decided in that moment that we needed to leave Nashville. It was not something we had considered up until then. The next morning I was working in my welding shop. As the sun came up over the city skyline I just started crying uncontrollably. Years of tension beginning to unravel. That night we started packing.“
Nelson Kempf looks back on this period of his life with a simple and warm beauty, his multi-tracked voice cooing over plucked harp and wispy sax, aurally painting the Nashville sunrise. He fills “Sweetness & Strife” with plenty of imagery, some stunning and some relatively mundane, but all seen with the golden glow of hindsight. As Kempf moves the song into its languid instrumental finale, we feel him relaxing into the moment, knowing now, years on, that the life-changing move he made at that time was the right one for he and his family.
Nelson Kempf’s debut album Family Dollar comes out on July 24 through Hourglass Records. You can follow him on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
