Αναλυτική Περιγραφή
In 2019, Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician
who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. “Here, let me
show you my idea,” he says, as he places a quarter on the kid’s hand. The magician
performs some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares
at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his
wonder finds a single word: “Cool.” The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album
from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. “When I
look at it now,” he says, “I relate to the kid, who’s obviously uneasy in his body, and
going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up
in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile
and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm.” “I’ve watched it probably a
hundred times,” he says. “It cracked me up but also blew my mind open— the
feeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what’s both real and magical.”
Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio that
over three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastic
training before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into
music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts released
on Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits
pulled at the thread of ego’s tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allowing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices that
felt communal and restorative.
“As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue my new songs with this
sense of playfulness and wonder I felt while exploring these other interests.” he
says. Feeling unlocked from the pressures of perfection that he often felt in his
earlier work, creating Disappearing Coin felt buoyant and healing. “The album
feels like an integration of all of my past musical selves zeroing in on the present,”
Steinbrink explains, “I felt free to explore new ways of writing, through different
perspectives, experimenting with fictional songwriting, visual archetypal
language, and total collaboration.” This “total collaboration” was a joyous new
venture after years of solo performing and recording.
The album can be seen as a 42 minute session of show and tell, the manifestation
of Steinbrink repeating the mantra of “Here, let me show you my idea” to himself
over and over. Disappearing Coin is at once a welcome return for the veteran
Steinbrink and the debut of a totally new artist, one who has found a new path to
himself with new goals of openness, curiosity, and self-acceptance.“Recalls the magic pop purity of Arthur
Russell…its minimalism manages to feel enlightened and transformative.”
- PITCHFORK
“…an emotionally powerful set of well-crafted
indie-pop combining inventive arrangements and
bright melodies with often-dark lyrics…”
- KEXP
“Melodic and self-assured. Steinbrink delivers his
knotted lyricism with a smooth lilt.”
-STEREOGUM
