Jud/Jude/Judith Brothers

"Blending traditional sensibilities with contemporary concerns, render tender / blunder sunder arrives ready to propel listeners into the heart of songwriter Jude Brothers’ rich emotional experience – journeying through the underworld of doubt, longing, heart-break, and loss of identity, and arriving on the other side lighter, at a place of expansiveness and healing. 

Recorded over two days in a light-filled and scrub-jay surrounded room on a mesa in Lamy, New Mexico, the album is suffused Brothers’ extended search for space, clarity, and expression following profound grief and doubt in the bizarre and often-public end of a long and fruitful romantic and musical partnership. Listeners accompany Brothers as they move through the dismantling of both artistic and private dreams and identities, confronting the reality of separation, and reasserting their distinct creative voice. 

The nine track record, a stripped down and honest presentation of Brothers’ free-form compositions on tenor guitar and Celtic lever harp, displays their ease working within the framework of American Folk Music paradigms – gleaned from a musical childhood in Northwest Arkansas, steeped in its attendant regional influences – and enriched through their abiding and engaged love of various world folk traditions. Gliding atop delicately plucked harp-laden lullabies and adventurous freak-folk romps is Brothers’ effortless, playful, and expressive lyricism, propelled by a fearless and dynamic vocal range reminiscent of Karen Dalton, Joanna Newsom, and Joni Mitchell.

Living at the intersection of heartbreak and psycho-drama, the collected songs of render tender / blunder sunder fall beautifully within the tradition of music that interrogates life – in this case, the often-baffling distances that can exist between what is imagined and what is lived, what is remembered and what is still being learned.

"All at once, the record merges threadbare singer/songwriter folk framework with string-forward melancholia. Brothers makes good use of their vast compositional talents, navigating grief and heartbreak through the always expanding doorways of loss. Songs like “Yar Wut Yar / I Love You for It!” and “Practicing Silence / Looking for Water!” establish just how free-form and surrendering Brothers’ work is, as they mine through the bizarre and the poetic to hone in their own visceral vision and unparalleled voice—the latter of which is Brothers’ greatest asset, their singing erupting through every arrangement like a profound, Joanna Newsom-conjuring, brilliant siren. Render Tender / Blunder Sunder is, at times, beyond articulation. It’s so deftly woven into the American Folk Songbook that the beautiful convergence of traditional song structure and off-the-beaten-path beauty is sometimes indecipherable. The album is a mark of unique, mystifying singularity." 

-Matt Mitchell, Paste Magazine