My Brother the Bear is Daniel Bayer. His latest album "Ring Around the Moon" is ten tracks that convey an inner monologue of life, love, and leaving home and coming back. Through his travels and time spent in the military, he brings the conversation from inside himself onto these ten tracks. A falsetto, guitar, harmonica, kick drum, some friends, and whistling My Brother the Bear for almost an hour brings you on the road with him. He invites you to share in the experiences that have lead him from leaving home and to his return. Making his home now in Cincinnati he brings to life his "inner monologue" as he recently told me.
The opening track "Huckleberry Finn" starts us on the road and into the inner workings of this singer songwriter. Just "knock another down" and keep going he says. To the next track "I'm Coming Home" a track that has the struggle with leaving home and then having to come back. The same brick the same freeway signs a place that on the outside never changed but inside you see it through a different lens. A couple tracks later we are introduced to a song called "Far Apart and Few Between" in which My Brother the Bear leaves his falsetto at the proverbial doorstep and speaks with a candor of someone thinking out loud of the places that have been seen and the place he is coming back to. In the next track "Abigail" comes to our ears a track that Bayer gathered twelve of his closest musician friends to help this song become full and breathe.
The album comes to a close with a Stephen Foster classic "Hard Times Come Again No More." With this track the album is wrapped up and closes with a thought. That through all the troubles of love, life, being away from home and coming back there is still always tomorrow..."Every day you have lingered all around my cabin door, oh hard times come again no more"....Sung calmly and distinctly through a melodic tone of voice you can hear the hope of better days to come.
These ten tracks that My Brother the Bear lends to our ears gives us insight into a songwriter who has traveled around a bit and seen life and love through a lens of a hopeful tomorrow, with the past always on his heels. I had the pleasure of asking him recently "why music?" And he said without skipping a beat "It's universal." Through this album he gives you a glimpse into his world that much of us have probably been down. For almost an hour you are welcomed inside the world of My Brother the Bear to get lost behind a falsetto that strikes that good chord maybe sometimes lost within one's soul.
My Brother the Bear
Northside Tavern
Tuesday September 10th
10p
