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Sonnets

by Andrew Swafford

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  • Cassette + Digital Album

    Lovingly crafted analog ambience.

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  • Full Digital Discography

    5
    releases

    Get all 5 Andrew Swafford releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Sonnets, Unscrewed (Single), ETA EP, Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, and Synth Tests. , and , .

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1.
Sonnet 1 (Sonnet 43) 03:20
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2.
Sonnet 2 (Indoors) 03:58
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3.
Sonnet 3 (Nightmare Fairy) 05:07
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4.
Sonnet 4 (Entombed) 03:23
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5.
Sonnet 5 (A Cold Dark Gentle Place) 02:43
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6.
Sonnet 6 (Sun Goddess) 06:54
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7.
Sonnet 7 (Punk) 06:30
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8.
Sonnet 8 (One More Roll in the Blackness) 05:37
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9.
Sonnet 9 (Visions of Graces) 05:20
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10.
Sonnet 10 (I Dream a Highway) 13:07
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credits

released July 28, 2022

This album opens with the sound of Patrick Stewart introducing his reading of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, a tender and delicate poem that illustrates the feeling of dreaming about someone. Stewart did this recording as a mental health exercise during COVID lockdown, reading one Shakespearean sonnet per day until he had exhausted the list.

Recorded gradually over the course of three tumultuous years, Sonnets has ended up becoming an album that bears a certain resemblance to Shakespeare’s Sonnets themselves: it’s autobiographical, it’s interconnected, and it has a sort of secret code to it that may only be fully comprehensible to its own creator. On a more universal level, it is an album about distance between people, as it started as a quarantine project and evolved alongside many personal relationships falling apart. The album closes with a cover of Gillian Welch’s staggeringly beautiful folk song “I Dream a Highway,” which serves as sort of reprise to the ideas meditated upon in the Shakespeare poem that opens the record.

Musically, this album is much more expansive than anything I’ve made before: it includes the aforementioned spoken word sequence, multiple recordings of drum machines, my new analog synth (the Korg Minilogue!), classical guitar, and much more electric guitar than previous records. It is a unified collection of all the different sounds I’ve been interested in exploring over the three years it took to record, so I hope you find something that resonates with you here.

Other credits worth pointing out: the album artwork incorporates the painting "Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairy's Dancing" by William Blake (who also was featured on the cover of my debut album, Synth Tests) and the third track was originally conceived as a score to the short film "Hallucina" by Deja Lytle (whose films have also been springboards for musical compositions on my last two releases).

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Andrew Swafford Knoxville, Tennessee

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