SEEING HER AGAIN
Darlin’ Brando | Release Spotlight
Darlin’ Brando has made a country EP full of people who could probably use a quiet evening.
Unfortunately, the band has other plans.
People dance while worrying about everything.
Smile for photographs while privately falling apart.
Have nightmares about relationships they thought they'd escaped.
And cling to love while knowing perfectly well how things are going.
All accompanied by music that sounds rather pleased with itself.
Welcome to Seeing Her Again.
Five songs, a healthy amount of pedal steel, some excellent fiddle, and enough trouble underneath the cheerful arrangements to keep a therapist busy for weeks.
It's a good record.
And a particularly interesting one from an artist who has returned to Nashville with a very different idea of how to make country music.
NASHVILLE, SECOND TIME AROUND
The first time Brandon Goldstein arrived in Nashville, things were rather different.
He was recently divorced, knew few people and was still learning how to lead a country band.
He spent time around the musicians at American Legion Post 82, absorbing the language of 1970s honky tonk and figuring out how it all worked.
His debut album, Also, Too…, arrived in 2020.
The sound of a honky-tonk band largely figuring things out in the room.
Nearly a decade after his first arrival, Goldstein returned to Nashville in spring 2025.
This time with a wife, a young daughter and considerably more experience.
The move followed a frightening period in California, where the Eaton Fire had come dangerously close to the family's Pasadena home. Financial considerations played a part too.
But the important change was in Goldstein himself.
He knew more about making records.
And apparently that meant knowing when to stop interfering.
For Seeing Her Again, he contacted producer Elijah Ocean, somebody whose music and production work he already admired but whom he hadn't yet met in person.
Brando arrived with a fairly clear idea of what he wanted.
Then gave Ocean room to change it.
A sensible decision, as it turns out.
FINDING THE COUNTRY SONG
Goldstein has a habit of writing songs with unexpected turns.
Musical detours.
Little complications.
The sort of things that can make a song interesting, although occasionally they can also make it rather busy.
Ocean helped him decide which ones were worth keeping.
Brando describes the producer's particular talent as finding “the ‘country songs’ within my songs.”
That's a lovely way of putting it.
Much of the EP was recorded with just the two of them at Back Cabin Sound in Madison, Tennessee. Ocean selected additional musicians, simplified arrangements and helped give the songs a more direct shape.
The result has plenty of character without feeling overcrowded.
Brando had been listening to the early 1980s country of Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter.
An interesting period.
Artists like Crowell, Cash and Carter were absorbing rock, punk and new wave without abandoning country music in the process.
That was the starting point.
But Seeing Her Again wanders further.
There are touches of heartland rock, 1990s Americana and the occasional musical idea that seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere outside Nashville.
A welcome wrong turn.
The guitars lean towards Stratocaster rather than the obvious Telecaster sound. Chorus effects give parts of the record that early-eighties character.
Jeremy Long supplies pedal steel and keyboards, while Clayton Campbell brings fiddle to two tracks.
And underneath it all sits Brando himself on drums.
You can hear the difference between this record and an artist trying very hard to demonstrate how much country music he knows.
Here, he sounds comfortable enough to enjoy it.
TROUBLE WITH A GOOD BEAT
Grab Your Partner opens the EP with a fairly straightforward proposal.
Life is exhausting.
Everything costs money.
Bad news arrives whether you've asked for it or not.
So get somebody onto the dance floor.
The fiddle and pedal steel make a convincing argument.
It's brisk, cheerful country music with the sort of rhythm that makes standing still feel faintly unreasonable.
The problems haven't disappeared, of course.
But they can wait until the next song.
And that next song is Seeing Her Again.
One of the EP's strongest moments.
It has an immediately catchy honky-tonk energy, the kind of tune that seems perfectly happy to accompany a Saturday night.
Then you pay attention to the words.
Brando is describing recurring nightmares about an ex.
The unsettling part is that the dream isn't about wanting the relationship back.
It's about somehow finding himself trapped in the past, unable to reach the person he actually loves.
The images become increasingly surreal.
Some are frankly ridiculous.
And that is part of the appeal.
Brando understands that anxiety can be absurd without becoming any less unpleasant.
The music bounces along.
The narrator is having a terrible time.
A rather effective combination.
SMILE FOR THE CAMERA
That's Why I'm Always Smiling (In Pictures) takes another familiar little human performance and gives it a country shuffle.
Looking happy.
Preferably where an ex might see it.
Even when things are going considerably worse than the photograph suggests.
There is some good writing here, particularly in the way Brando treats emotional concealment with humour rather than self-pity.
Ocean adds chord variations and a fuzz-tone guitar lead, giving the classic shuffle a slightly crooked edge.
It isn't the song that grabbed us most strongly on first listen.
But its place on the EP makes sense.
Brando keeps returning to people who are doing their best to appear functional while something else is happening underneath.
Sometimes all you can manage is a convincing smile.
Preferably with decent lighting.
THAT'S HOW IT GOES
Then How It Is takes the record somewhere else.
And musically, it's one of the most interesting tracks here.
There is country in its foundations, certainly, but the arrangement moves comfortably through other influences.
Brando had the Everly Brothers and the Cactus Blossoms in mind, while his co-writer Edith Freni repeatedly brought Huey Lewis and the News into the conversation.
That's quite a gathering.
The song began as a poem Freni wrote before the family's move to Nashville.
During the drive from Los Angeles, the two began turning it into lyrics.
At first, it was partly intended as advice for their daughter.
Then they decided that giving advice was probably the wrong approach.
A wise decision.
Nobody enjoys being lectured by a country song.
Instead, How It Is observes the business of being alive.
People make mistakes.
They clean things up.
Sometimes they leave.
Eventually, everybody runs out of time.
And in the meantime, life carries on.
There's a wonderfully dry acceptance to the whole thing.
The song also demonstrates how far Brando has moved beyond simply recreating the honky-tonk records he once studied so closely.
He knows the vocabulary now.
He can do something else with it.
KEEP MOVING
The EP closes with Holdin’ On, a Lee Emerson song recorded by Connie Smith in the mid-1960s.
And this is another standout.
A sad song with a surprisingly buoyant arrangement.
There's a lovely swing to it, helped by those jazzy piano touches that give the music a little extra movement.
It feels like something you could put on during a long drive.
Windows down.
Plenty of road ahead.
Although the lyrics are considerably less carefree.
Brando hears something different in his version than in Smith's recording.
Where he hears manic desperation in hers, his interpretation is about somebody trying to remain composed while quietly falling apart.
That distinction comes through.
The music keeps moving forward, even as the person inside the song struggles to let go.
And as a closing track, it works beautifully.
There is a fade at the end.
A small detail, but a good one.
The song seems to continue somewhere beyond the record.
As if the band has driven off and left us standing there.
FIVE SONGS, ONE GOOD IDEA
Brando didn't set out to make a concept EP.
But listening to these five songs together, there's a natural progression.
We begin on the dance floor, trying to forget our problems.
Then come the nightmares, the forced smiles and the rather uncomfortable business of accepting how life works.
By Holdin' On, the jokes have mostly disappeared.
The band, thankfully, hasn't.
And that is what makes Seeing Her Again such an enjoyable record.
Brando has a talent for putting difficult feelings inside music that refuses to sit still.
Anxiety gets a dance band.
Heartbreak gets a shuffle.
A nightmare gets a catchy chorus.
And quiet desperation gets enough swing to keep travelling down the road.
There is also something appealing about the confidence behind the recording.
Goldstein returned to Nashville with more experience and a clearer sense of himself.
Then trusted Elijah Ocean to help him strip the songs back, find their shape and let the music do its work.
The result is five tracks that move easily between honky tonk, country shuffle, early-eighties influences and Americana without losing their personality.
Seeing Her Again arrives October 16, with a release show at Star Rover Sound in Nashville on October 24.
It sounds like Darlin' Brando has stopped worrying quite so much about making the right kind of country record.
Which is fortunate.
Because this one is a lot of fun.
Even if nobody in the songs seems to be having a particularly good week.