Ron Brunk
“Lemon Mountain Manatee” & “Fading” from Love Bomb
Directed by Todd Stotler and Ron Brunk
Added 9/16/2024
About Ron Brunk
About “Lemon Mountain Manatee”
Take “Lemon Mountain Manatee.” Here is Brunk at his most whimsical, piling surreal images atop each other like a great stack of pillows, engaging in the wordplay, free association, and wit that his fans have come to expect from him. Call it a children’s song for grownups — a playful expression of wonder and delight and a peek behind the drab surface of quotidian reality into a vibrant, hidden world. The music, too, feels like discovery in action. This is guitar pop, but it’s uncommonly sophisticated, and it sounds as welcoming as a handshake from a friend. Ron Brunk foregrounds his sprightliness and verve, and delivers it all with a smile. It feels like he’s singing with his eyes wide open. .
About “Fading”
“Fading” is just as aware, and just as present to the moment. Its tone, however, is far more ruminative. This is Ron Brunk the realist, the street-corner philosopher and soul poet, reflecting on the trajectory of being and costs of living that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. He’s matched it with music that hews closer to the Americana that you might expect to get from an independent artist from West Virginia, but the melody is as hooky as that of any pop hit. If “Manatee” is a brilliant dawn, “Fading” is the twilight. It doesn’t seem possible that the same album could accommodate these two tracks, but they fit right in on the flexible, varied, and endlessly colorful Love Bomb — an album that, like all sets by Ron Brunk, tells a story in sound.
About the “Lemon Mountain Manatee” and ‘Fading” Music Videos
He can express himself in pictures, too. The radiant “Lemon Mountain Manatee” video, full of images saturated with sunrise yellows and sunset oranges, was realized by the talented animator Todd Stotler, but it was Brunk himself who conceived of this fantastic daydream. It’s a fantasy waterpark on the highest day of June, populated by sea creatures and mystery beings, and by you, if you’re lucky enough to align yourself with Brunk’s “cosmic vib-er-ations”. The “Fading” video, made by the artist himself, is another matter altogether. This is an intimate study in black and white: his face as he sings, his hands on the piano, his posture shifting ever so slightly to better bear the burden of his thoughts. Which one is the real Ron Brunk? They both are, of course — as are hundreds of other moods he captures in hundreds of other songs, each one a unique sonic world.