Brooks Neria
Midwestern songwriter
Brooks Neria is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer from Carl Junction, Missouri. He is currently based in Madrid, Spain.
He has played in folk groups, indie-rock outfits, cover groups, and church bands. He is currently spending his time working on his solo project under his own name as well as producing and playing for other musicians and collaborators
His project is centered around his solo compositions and arrangements for voice and guitar. Neria combines personal lyrics, fluid finger picking, and heartfelt vocals to provide a dramatic but sincere loud-quiet dynamic to accompany his narrative poetry.
Brooks is influenced by many of the old greats of the singer-songwriter tradition (Dylan, Van Zandt, Mitchell, Young, etc.) as well as the indie groups and artists that saw an explosion in the 2000's and 2010's (Big Thief, Fleet Foxes, Pinegrove, etc.) His music explores themes of growing up, lost friends and lovers, immigration, democratic backsliding, and the day-to-day life of a young person living in a world as strange as ours has become.
He recently released his debut single "Telluride" on all platforms. It is a steady building indie-folk ballad about leaving home, inexperienced love, and hindsight.
He is a very active participant in his local Madrid scene, and is currently organizing to play more shows around Spain and Europe. This summer his is set to play in London and Switzerland, with more international dates to be announced in the fall.
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This song was written during a long, slow summer. It was the first summer in which I lived with my partner, and our first summer in a foreign country. Her and I were both teaching in schools at the time, so when summer Read more
This song was written during a long, slow summer. It was the first summer in which I lived with my partner, and our first summer in a foreign country. Her and I were both teaching in schools at the time, so when summer arrived, we suddenly had much more free time.
We lived in an attic in a hot town in Spain. The afternoons were so hot that we'd go to the river almost every day after getting done with our online work that we had scrapped together to make money while school was out.
It was a summer of learning. We had put things off, and this newfound free time disallowed us from putting them off any longer. We worked on things, both as individuals and as a unit. It was happy, sad, cathartic, and motivating all at the same time. For me personally, it was a big moment of becoming more honest with myself about things I needed to work on.
All of the details in the song come from real things, people, stories, and habits, but they are not all as they appear.
We lived in an attic in a hot town in Spain. The afternoons were so hot that we'd go to the river almost every day after getting done with our online work that we had scrapped together to make money while school was out.
It was a summer of learning. We had put things off, and this newfound free time disallowed us from putting them off any longer. We worked on things, both as individuals and as a unit. It was happy, sad, cathartic, and motivating all at the same time. For me personally, it was a big moment of becoming more honest with myself about things I needed to work on.
All of the details in the song come from real things, people, stories, and habits, but they are not all as they appear.