The coincidence isnt lost on Mary Bragg that her two new songs Fight and Fool are being released on Valentines Day. Both tracks, from the Nashville singer-songwriters upcoming album Violets as Camouflauge (out March 1st), deal with relationship struggles and the ways people respond as things are falling apart, or maybe even after they have already collapsed.
Most things that people experience on Valentines Day are just the sort of saccharine, idyllic picture of what romance and relationships should be, she says, calling Rolling Stone Country while shes on the road. But I am happy to address the more realistic side of relationships on a day when were all pretending to hold up relationships to the light.
The mostly acoustic, meditative Fight, which Bragg wrote with Robby Hecht (who also adds harmonies on the recording), imagines two people trying to open themselves to one another in hopes of salvaging the relationship. If you hide from me and I hide from you, any light between us wont come through, they sing. In this case, Bragg and Hecht both had personal experiences that they couldnt easily mask as they were writing.
In this case, we both had and have a whole lot of difficulty to use as source material, says Bragg. Every day you wake up and you choose how to approach your life, your relationship choices, how you choose to love the person, whether its with an automatic level of forgiveness and understanding, or you wake up and choose that thats not gonna be that day. The song is aimed at uncovering these realities of a relationship that is falling apart and youre making an attempt, at least, to choose the path that even if you might be doomed in the end youre gonna fight your absolute darndest to make sure you havent just thrown in the towel before you were supposed to.
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The second selection, Fool, almost works like a companion to Fight. Its a smokier, more sinewy offering with a full band backing Bragg who previously ventured into all-out rock & roll with pal Becky Warren as the Reckless Electric. Tell me you think we can try again, she pleads, as if having realized a mistake.
Say you throw in the towel and then you realize youre an absolute fool and then youre like, Oh my god, what have I done. This is absolutely wrong,' she says. Fool is an imaginary next step to what might happen if you do give up at the end of Fight.'
Both songs depict scenarios in which the characters lay themselves bare, revealing pain even as they open themselves up for more. Its a thread that continues through all of Violets as Camouflauge, which Bragg self-produced in her own studio, whether through the Nashville Sound-influenced I Thought You Were Somebody Else and its reckoning with deception or the gentle chamber-pop accents of Fixed and its reassurances against self-doubt.
Its probably a little nerdy, but each song gets a score, she says. And I look through to see why a certain song isnt landing as much as the next, and often that has to do with vulnerability. Because that vulnerability in the song, to me, becomes the essential quality that then reaches another human being. It also directly correlates to my own vulnerability and my co-writers vulnerability in the room on the day that we wrote a particular song. We have to be open enough on the day were trying to achieve this piece of art, and if were not, were probably gonna fail at that job.