The Clearwater Swimmers learn to go with the current

Sumner Bright described the songs populating the Clearwater Swimmers’ self-titled debut, from 2024, as some of the most grounded, organic he has yet put to tape, recounting how they arrived at a point in time when the singer and songwriter started to grapple more fully with the person they had been, along with who they wanted to be moving forward.

“I had that age 25, what-the-hell-is-going-on moment where I really needed to ground myself and take stock of all of my life experiences so far,” said Bright, who in doing so began to reconnect with the more plainspoken folk music they listened to as a child in Maine. “In the past, I’ve often dug myself into this hole thinking that a good song needs to be weird or complex or filled with all of these parts that people wouldn’t expect. But I grew up with music that was antithetical to that, and I grew up with folk music and these simpler tools of communication. And I think I was missing that really simple connection to songwriting.”

A collision of events helped to inspire this more stripped-bare, introspective turn, including a romantic breakup and an October 2021 move to New York, with the unfamiliar city environs leading Bright to lean into songs more rooted in nature. On “River,” the musician wrestles with the way circumstances can pull people apart even as they scratch and claw against the water currents, while “Let Us Be Strangers” envisions a future where former intimates might exist as complete unknowns, passing one another like “wind[s] blown in two directions.”

The deeply atmospheric music on The Clearwater Swimmers, an album that recalls everything from Neil Young at his moodiest (dig the fuzzed-out riffs slicing their way through “Valley”) to the lilting AM radio worlds constructed by Andy Shauf (“Proud”), moves with universal patience, exhibiting a consistency of tone from which Bright has typically shied. 

“Oftentimes, I challenge myself to write in different ways, where this album came from a pretty cohesive place, which felt first and foremost like a cathartic thing,” said Bright, who allowed himself to go with these creative currents in spite of the lingering discomfort he felt in doing so. “I’m definitely someone who needs a lot of new things circulating in my life. Growing up, I moved around a lot with my mom, and I think that geographical thing is fully ingrained in me to where I have to be really careful not to let myself get bored or stagnant. And that idea works its way into every aspect of my life.”

Though informed by loss and transition, the songs on The Clearwater Swimmers ripple with warmth and resilience, Bright not only acknowledging these accumulated scars but expressing genuine gratitude for the ways they have helped to form him. Witness “Weathervane,” on which the musician gives thanks for “the gift of … company and time and joy and love and pain,” going on to repeat the word “pain” eight times as a means of solidifying this point.

“Sure, a lot of it was being sad over a failed relationship, but you can still be grateful for that time, or maybe at least find relief in knowing you’re young and in the world without a clear sense of who you are or what you’re doing yet, which is an idea that can be liberating,” said Bright, who will join bandmates Sander Casale (guitar), Timothy Graff (drums) and Connor Kennedy (bass) in concert at Rambling House on Thursday, Feb. 13. “I think we learn our most valuable lessons in those times – even more so than in periods of joy. … And a lot of the songs are sort of geared toward that idea, trying to take all of the experiences and information I’ve collected thus far and really trying to reshape things from that place of gratitude.”

The redemptive feel of the album was further informed by a series of illnesses that rocked Bright’s family in the months leading into May 2024 recording sessions at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island, and which left the musician emotionally shaken and instilled with an unshakeable belief that he too must be sick. “Being worried about losing people I cared about, and losing people I cared about, I fell into this weird health spiral, and I was in the throes of this crazy, OCD fixation thing where I was certain I was dying of cancer,” Bright said.

After living with these fears for months, the musician finally relented and checked into the hospital emergency room to have himself examined in the days before going to the studio. Thankfully, Bright received the all-clear from doctors, which he said allowed him to go into sessions “more lightened.” “Otherwise, I would have been in a much worse headspace,” he said. “But, yeah, after that we were all able to get in the pocket and bang out the album. And then we all went home.”