Singer/songwriter Bruce Sudano releases new Single-Video

Singer/songwriters are having an incredible year right now, and on the independent side of the industry, I think this statement is twice as true as it is for major label players. Bruce Sudano has spent his career toeing the line between these two realms in the music business, having composed a number of smash hits over the course of the last four decades for both himself and other artists, but in his new single “The Mountain” and its colorful music video, I think he makes it more than clear to us that his present-day artistry is far more indebted to an indie ethos than it is anything out of the commercialized mainstream.

Sudano brings all heart and no filler to the table in “The Mountain,” and that’s evident in the construction of the relationship between his verses and the instrumentation here alone. There’s an aesthetical balance between his patient dispensing of lyrics and the rollicking groove driving home his acoustic guitar part in this song, and while the music video’s imagery steals some of our attention away from the hook (rightly so, considering the grandiosity of the former’s production style), there’s never an instance where the melodies in the background aren’t influencing our interpretation of both the visuals and the words that inspired them.

It’s admittedly a little rough and tumble in stylization compared to what you’re going to get out of a mainstream folk-rocker this season, but for the discerning singer/songwriter enthusiast, Bruce Sudano’s “The Mountain” is quite the special treat indeed. There are a lot of players in alternative folk that have been trying to hammer out the same strain of beats that Sudano is so adeptly arranging here, and if they were to take a page out of his playbook with regards to applying conservative compositional concepts to guitar-born harmonies, I think this emerging era for the genre would be better off than it is now in more ways than one.

Mindy McCall