Matt Dorrien, whose debut album was named KEXP DJ Greg Vandy’s 2018 “Album of the Year”, is back with “Burrowed”, the first song off of his beautiful and sorrow-tinged holiday E.P. My Christmas Plea, which is out December 18th. MusicTAP is pleased to bring you the video/song (below).
Dorrien’s songs have always danced with sorrow and this new collection is no different. Yet, with My Christmas Plea, Dorrien reflects on the dark state of our current holiday season with an E.P. that doesn’t linger too long on sadness, but acts more as a plea for empathy. Dorrien has composed a set of songs that harken back to elaborate holiday songs of yore. Co-produced by Ryan Oxford (Y La Bamba), Dorrien is on piano and vocals throughout, backed by upright bass (Andrew Jones) and percussion (Mike Lockwood) and a full string and horn ensemble (written and arranged by Dorrien).
Speaking about the E.P.’s first single “Burrowed”, Dorrien reflects: “When I was a little kid, we left everything I knew in Long Island for a brand new start in L.A. It was such a devastating and jarring experience for me as a child that it has influenced everything I’ve done since. Even my childhood Christmases are intrinsically tied to this event. They are bound to my sense of displacement, loss, and change. The overarching theme of this song is the passing of time, and fleetingness of childhood and innocence.” As per the ideas behind the E.P. and the hope he still holds in human potential, Dorrien says, “Like Scrooge’s nephew in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I think of Christmas “as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” Or rather, I celebrate Christmas as a reminder of this human potential, and hope there are others who do the same. Christmas for me is not only pine scented evenings, ghosts of breath in the night air, warm living rooms gathered with loved ones around the fire, the rich aroma of cinnamon and orange rind, and visions of gently falling snow; but also it is a reminder of who we are and why we are here. To give of oneself for the betterment of humanity: this is the meaning of existence, and what Christmas signals for me at the end of every hectic year. This collection of songs, My Christmas Plea, is a plea to humanity–in a year as divisive, and rife with tumult as this has been– to open up our hearts and minds, and have empathy for each other, no matter how impossible that seems.”
My Christmas Plea will be released on Friday, December 18th, 2020.