Bring Prudence – Coal Miner’s Son – Premiere

The melancholic track you’re about to hear, amounts to something like opening a box of old Fuji-film pictures–photo’s fuzzy and faded capture moments of Oleh Zaychenko’s life (Bring Prudence).

Oleh moved to Illinois from Ukraine when he was 13. As a way to cope with isolation, he started writing poems and recording songs into his cell phone. By 16, he had saved up enough money from his Dunkin Donuts job to buy a guitar. “Coal Miner’s Son” is the first to represent a body of work that can be dissected into witticism-thoughts via immigrant songs that describe the American landscape in folklore. With clever use of 90’s references and lost tales of youth, the track also features Jared Van Fleet (Beirut, Sparrow House, Voxtrot) on piano and bass; often providing the subtle tinge of emotional exclamations along a familiar folk-song guitar pattern, one listen alone to the lyrical content provides a whole new prospective to the stew.

As most of my favorite bedroom albums go, Red Horses (which Coal Miner’s Son will be featured on) was self-recorded and produced in his bedroom. One day, Oleh played the album to his friend Jared van Fleet (Beirut, Voxtrot, Sparrow House), who had the idea of layering in a soft cushion of piano, bass, and percussion, what was originally conceived as a stark acoustic record grew into its own with Jared’s attuned and intuitive ear. But before this could all come into light, Bring Prudence’s first full-length album was a product of Sparrow Night: a weekly workshop held by Oleh and his friends in the kitchen of their Crown Heights apartment where they motivated each other to make art on a regular basis. Each Sunday, Oleh brought in a brand new song to be critiqued by his roommates, friends, and other local artists, through the guidance of community, the result was ultimately Red Horses; a cohesive collection of intimate moments, stories, and quips, all carrying the same thread, from-Ukraine-to-Chicago-to-Brooklyn.

His debut full length Red Horses will be released on September 23rd with a show at Cake Shop in Manhattan, perfect timing for the intimacy our singer/songwriters provide New Yorkers, as the air thins and the drinks get warmer, Oleh’s got a more than enough material worth a mediative gander to ease those Seasonal Blues.