Growing Pains: Tensions Between Then and Now on Willingdone’s “Bridges Freeze First”
Review by: Emily D. Schmidt, Writer @emwritesaboutmusic
Edited by: Andrew Perrizo, Owner/Editor @PlaylistTC
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Music is a time capsule. Both the lyrical messages and the audio production can give a glimpse into a song’s time of creation. Ben Rosenberg, who goes by the artist name Willingdone, explores this ability as his mixes new and old to create his first full-length album, Bridges Freeze First.
Images
Growing up in a midwestern town similar to my hometown, the images Rosenberg captures on this album feel familiar. There wasn’t much to do or many places to go outside my parents’ house or my friends’ parents’ houses, and what there was to do usually required access to a car. Similarly, many images in Bridges Freeze First pertain to driving in one way or another, usually to find a private place to process many different emotions Rosenberg experienced as a young adult.
My favorite line is “every road ends up in the dirt,” from “The Feeling of Falling.” It gives me a tangible sensory connection to the transition from pavement to gravel roads beneath the wheels of my car - the pull of the steering wheel and the added friction of crunching of rocks under rubber. Still living in the middle of the country today, I’d never thought of what happens when roads end. This place lives on the outskirts of what you once knew and at the entrance of a new place, both physically and spiritually.
Audio
Rosenberg uses experimental techniques to create the sounds you hear on Bridges Freeze First. He first started making music on an organ in his grandmother’s living room, and he incorporates another of hers into his music, namely in “Dwelling.” Some of his other early recordings are also interspersed throughout this album. Apart from performing live, Rosenberg plays every part of his music, using the multi-instrument setup seen below. In addition to those electronic sounds, he experiments in his editing, uses extended techniques on his instruments, and sometimes creates music with objects that aren’t instruments at all. You can hear sounds from kitchen drawers and scissors on “Silent Partner,” and wine glasses with bowed ukulele on “Nosebleed.”
Message
Roland Barthes - most known for his famous “Death of the Author” essay - came up with a musical term called “patination.” I learned about it when I wrote my college thesis on country music, but the connection to Bridges Freeze First was obvious to me. When music is “patinated” (like the teal patina copper gets as it weathers), it has been, according to Barthes, “given the wear of a language that had been living, functioning and working for ages past.”* Rosenberg’s audio production paired with the personal stories in his lyrics creates an album with sounds that ground it in something real.
So when listening to Bridges Freeze First, you’re getting a glimpse into Rosenberg’s life both as a young adult from Iowa and as the person he is today. The intrinsic connections to then and now in both his music and his lyrics create the ache I get in my chest when I see my family or childhood friends who still live back home now continuing their lives parallel to mine from a thousand miles away. Regardless of where you’re from and whether or not you still live there, this album raises familiar questions of growth, change, and roots that anyone can benefit from listening to.
*Quoted in “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” by Geoff Mann.
