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6 Degrees Entertainment

Title - Late Bloomer
Artist - Brett Wiscons

For those of you not in the know, sometimes, the most difficult circumstances offer a silver lining. One has to look for it, but it’s there, ready to be discovered.

Indiana-based singer, songwriter, and five-time author Brett Wiscons felt that reality all too keenly when the pandemic made for unique and trying times to put together his forthcoming album, Late Bloomer, and the silver-lining mentality ended up permeating the songs on the record.

“I just wanted to offer hope in a seemingly hopeless situation,” Wiscons says of the genesis for this album. “These songs wouldn’t have existed without the kindness of my Kickstarter backers, and I wouldn’t have written some of them if it hadn’t been for the global pandemic.”

His new full-length album, Late Bloomer, was a labor of love created with mix engineer, producer and collaborator Thom Daugherty (The Elms, The Band Perry), and it will be released on July 13th, 2022 via Wiscons’ own label, MAD Diamond Entertainment.

1. Vertical City
2. Walk Tall
3. Late Bloomer
4. Déjà You
5. Collection of Hearts
6. When You Canʼt Breathe
7. Letʼs Do it Again
8. Any Other Kind of Way
9. French Café (Inside a Dream)
10. October

This exuberantly charged and vibrantly spirited new album opens on the rock guitar and piano rollercoaster of Vertical City and the rhythmic Walk Tall and then brings us the euphorically strident Late Bloomer, the achingly beautiful balladry of Déjà You and then comes the AOR yearn found within Collection of Hearts.

Next up is the forthright, fist clenched stand within the powerful When You Canʼt Breathe and the finger-snapping, foot-tapping melodies of Letʼs Do it Again which are in turn backed by the thunderous guitar rock of Any Other Kind of Way, one of my own personal favorites, the upbeat and playful French Café (Inside a Dream), the album coming to a close on the dulcet, mid-tempo balladry of October.

Musicians:
Thom Daugherty - guitars, bass, mellotron, background vocals
Niko Albanese - drums
Steven Potaczek - keys (1, 2, 4-10) accordion (9)
Sarah Scharbrough McLaughlin - background vocals (1,2,5)
Mark Bryan - mandolin (4)
Megan Campbell - vocals (4)
Mark Evitts - string arrangement (5)
Craig Shields- saxophone (7)
Rachel McGoye - vocals (7)
Seth Jenkins - slide guitar (4)
Kadell Randle Jr. - keys (3)
Brett Wiscons - vocals

“Well before the pandemic hit, I had an idea for a song called ‘Late Bloomer’ in May of 2019” Wiscons recalls. “I told Thom about it and he, almost without thinking, said, ‘I have a chord progression that will work for that song idea.’ I then wrote the lyrics on a plane from Indy to Phoenix. They just poured out of me. I am a late bloomer, and I figured many other folks out there might be able to relate to this song.”

Late Bloomer was released as a single in February 2020, mere weeks before everything shut down, but the track garnered Wiscons new fans from as far afield as Australia, Morocco, and the UK, to name a few places where other “late bloomers” chimed in to let Wiscons know how much his song resonated with them. In July of 2020, “Late Bloomer” appeared on the soundtrack for the new “NASCAR Heat 5” video game on Xbox and PlayStation.

With the song out in the world, Wiscons and Daugherty had huge aspirations to record a full album by the same name. “I knew it had to be done, but I knew it was going to be expensive to produce,” Wiscons says. “I’d had success with Kickstarter before, so I ran a campaign and hoped for the best.”

What happened next blew Wiscons away. “Somehow, 137 people scattered around the country believed in me and this project, and we raised over twenty-two thousand dollars and were completely funded two weeks into the 30-day campaign.”

Wiscons and Daugherty had planned to get to work in mid-March of 2020, but the pandemic had a little to say first. “We were so eager to get rolling, but then, quite literally, like the rest of the world, we got shut down,” Wiscons remembers.

By May 2020, they started working remotely, writing lyric and song ideas and passing them back and forth via text and email while communicating through the Marco Polo app. Two of the collected songs were directly influenced by the pandemic and lockdown itself: “Walk Talk” and “Vertical City.”

“I was feeling all sorts of emotions during that time; anxiety, fear, doubt, and worry seem to be the ones that stuck around the longest, at least initially,” Wiscons says, “but then hope started to emerge. Seeing news footage of a desolate New York City with empty streets and sidewalks was the beginning of the song ‘Vertical City.’”

News topics and emotional responses laced other tracks, and the songwriting pair also tackled what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis (“When You Can’t Breathe”), parenthood (“Let’s Do it Again”), and wishful thinking (“French Café”).

“You really hear all of the influences Thom and I grew up with come out in these songs,” Wiscons says. There are shades of The Beatles, Pearl Jam, Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Hootie & the Blowfish all over the songs on the album, but with Wiscons’ unique spin on things making it feel fresh and new.

Official Pre-Order Purchase Link

Official Website

Brett Wiscons @ Facebook

Brett Wiscons @ Twitter

Brett Wiscons @ Instagram

Brett Wiscons @ Spotify





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