There are lots of people who write songs. There are many people who write great songs. But there are few people are able to invite you into the idiosyncracies of their headspace for the duration of their songs. Mylo’s music does just that. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, a former member of queer country band par excellence Small Talk, builds their music on small, intimate moments:
Every winter
I hear the neighbors growing old
Knocking their boots free of the snow
That keeps them moving
Those are the opening lines to the first song on their debut album, Delta. In “Looking Back Soon,” Mylo introduces the major themes in the album: mortality, nature, and one’s impact on the world. Mylo was born in raised in Wisconsin by their mother, who is a Korean-American from Hawaii, and their father, who’s from Pennsylvania. They were raised Buddhist, and the sense of being in the moment and accepting the inevitable permeates the album. Delta is two years in the making and documents important transitions in Mylo’s life: “When writing the album, I was in the midst of a total transformation of my life, a death and rebirth. Most of the songs are about the joy, pain, hope, and hopelessness that accompanies that kind of change.”
“Kolea’s First Journey” incorporate’s Mylo’s careful natural observations of the Kolea bird from Hawaii — along with a meditation on reincarnation. You may not subscribe to this worldview, but Delta will help you understand it better. That’s because Mylo does such a great job of connecting the minutiae of our lives to the metaphysical. When Mylo sings “We Came to Leave This Place Behind,” it’s not a bitter or apprehensive song: instead it reminds us of the fundamental nature of things. Delta came from a time when Mylo sought stability amid many changes: for the rest of us, it offers a path to finding it for ourselves.
