‘Cause I’m a future gazer, a past dweller And I’ve always been a storyteller But no one’s listening anymore And I’m a latecomer, a last chancer A slow runner and a final dancer You see me glide across the floor – “ Remember to Forget,” Passenger “There’s real beauty in the everyday of those songs,” Rosenberg says. It’s agile guitars and folksy refrains, the kind of adult pop that bespeaks heartbreaks of all kinds, right there next to our feet, or the table over a solo meandering of bar counter castaways. And in Passenger’s trademark brand of soul-baring vocals and touching, no-frills lyricism, we sink into an old familiar intimacy. I write probably most days if I’m honest,” he tells me.
“I think it’s the job of a songwriter to write about whatever is going on in their life.” Joking that his life is “insufferably boring,” Rosenberg remarks on his penchant for writing songs from the perspective of others but as seasons come and go in his own life, he chronicles them all. At some point, his four-year-old cat Charlie (“He’s like a little teddy bear”) makes an appearance. Blokey and down-to-earth, he is speaking to me from the countryside in Brighton. “Life breaks a lot of people’s hearts one way or another,” Rosenberg explains. The record, in this way, is more like a valentine to the tales of everyday characters, as they float about thematic pub-nights and hazy ballroom dancefloors. In “Suzanne,” an older woman reminisces her youth in the music video for “Remember to Forget,” an elderly man dances in glassy stupor in a near-empty pub.
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It’s easy to characterize Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted as a breakup album, but that would hardly capture the record’s full narrative scope - a mise en scène that builds up a universe around its cast of actors and their many-faced heartaches. How many times can I tell you You’re lovely just the way you are Don’t let the world come and change you Don’t let life break your heart Don’t put on their mask, don’t wear their disguise Don’t let them dim the light that shines in your eyes If only you could love yourself the way that I love you – “ The Way That I Love You,” Passenger And in hindsight, I think it was actually something subconsciously, sort of saying goodbye to it, you know?” Rosenberg says. “I wrote before the breakup, and I kind of just assumed it was a really sweet little love song. Opening track “Sword from the Stone” bristles softly at its introduction, a love letter to the inevitable line of inquiry that fills our heads in the wake of a now-absent lover: “ How’re you feeling sweetheart? / Are you moving on? / Are you sleeping okay? / Or do the nights go on and on?” while fourth track “The Way That I Love You” is all affectionate lyricism and serenade of what is, perhaps, the universal sentiment of “If only you could love yourself the way that I love you.” Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted – Passenger Emerging out of a breakup, the record is a blanket of dust and broken hearts, of just-dried tears and nostalgic smiles toward a relationship recently past. Since 2009, Mike David Rosenberg has swept the folk pop scene with regular, prolific output, and his twelfth studio album, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted, is a mood-saturated collection of love’s hangover. Passenger doesn’t write songs for the casually in love. Life breaks a lot of people’s hearts one way or another. Passenger chats with Atwood Magazine about his latest release ‘Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted’, the place of songwriting in his life, and John Prine.
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