Secretly Group CMJ Showcase: Ben Abraham, Briana Marela, Steven A. Clark, Marlon Williams, Night Beds

Born and raised in Seattle, Briana Marela has traveled some but has always called the state of Washington home. There is a sense of place in her music — a sense of nature, of the northwest and of the unique space that exists between cities and wilderness. More than that, however, Briana draws inspiration from the people around her. Not just the emotions they evoke, but also the tactile feelings those emotions bring us: the warmth of affection; the weightlessness of joy; the grounded, anchored feeling of love. That gift for illuminating the abstract is counterbalanced by a remarkable clarity in Briana's lyrics, and that straightforwardness manifests itself in powerful ways. Briana's lyrics are forceful, and throughout her second album All Around Us, traditional song structure gives way to plainspoken declarations that pull back the record's shroud.

Briana began writing music in early high school. "I started dreaming up melodies before I even picked up an instrument," she explains. "I wrote songs on acoustic guitar in high school and I guess I didn't fully realize the other options that existed for creating music. I never imagined I'd be making music using computers someday." It wasn't until Briana left home to attend college in Olympia that she turned her efforts toward music technology, audio production and composition. Learning about the manipulation of melody, vocals and sound through more experimental music is what ultimately drove her and influenced her pop compositions.

"Something changed in me when I started learning about about sound and sound manipulation, about computers' space in making music, and then I couldn't ever go back to playing guitar." In these mediums, Briana found deeper inspiration for composing, arranging, and for approaching music in a whole new way. Appropriately, the album track "Everything is New" was the first song Briana ever wrote using vocal looping techniques, and it sparked what would become a bottomless exploration into manipulated sound.

All Around Us, named after a children's picture book, traces Briana's transition between places, beginning just before she began her first-ever tour in 2012. While on that tour with her sister, Briana performed at an art gallery in Providence, Rhode Island, and it was there that she crossed paths with the artist Scott Alario. He ended up sharing Briana's music with his best friend Alex Somers, the Sigur Rós & Jónsi-affiliated musician and producer, who would go on to produce All Around Us. Later that year—on the day, incidentally, that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world—Briana got an email from Alex that would eventually bring them to work together in Iceland. "As soon as we met, we didn't feel like strangers. It was instant friendship," Briana says. "I have strong production visions for my music, but it was so important and fun to work with Alex, to collaborate and to challenge the way I record and do things myself." Working with Somers, Icelandic group Amiina, and others, Briana's formidable talents revealed themselves even more vividly than before.

The magic of this collaboration is evident on the album track "Surrender", which is musically delicate at first, with flickering blips and chords that float into earshot like fireflies. As drums and vocals build, the drama escalates and steepens until we are struck with one bold, mantra-like affirmation: "I'll give you all I've got." "Take Care of Me" is the album's brightest and most immediate song, a buoyant celebration of friendship with a skittering beat and a warm, sweet melody. And title track "All Around Us" is a stark but inspiring beauty, built on the memory of a family member of Briana's who passed away, and the sadness of not being able to say "goodbye" or "I love you" one last time. It is here that Briana declares, clearly and succinctly: "If you love me, say it now. And mean it. For you may never get another chance."

When Briana talks about herself, she speaks directly about her own shyness, acknowledging it in the context of how it informs her songwriting. "My songs are my way to express feelings boldly that I could never speak aloud," she says. "They are my plea to be heard."
It is the balance of the abstract and the intimate that makes Briana Marela and All Around Us so special. There's a place for us all in these songs. We can nestle and tuck ourselves in between their loops and slopes and blankets of sound. We can think about ourselves and one another. Briana Marela's All Around Us tempts these questions: What's so confounding about the truths right in front of us? Why do we hear something simply-stated and assume it's a trick, or the ghost of something else? As an album, All Around Us feels mysterious at first, but reveals itself to be a record of remarkable honesty, and of direct, deeply felt emotions. All Around Us is about relationships with people, about friendship, about improving oneself and finding the bravery to feel, give and show love.


A lone wolf in a world of ego- and fantasy-driven R&B, Steven A. Clark makes music from a place that is personal yet universal, mining his own experiences with love and heartbreak to create songs that are inherently relatable. Raised in the '80s and '90s — a time when artists like Michael Jackson, Sade and Seal were shattering music's racial boundaries with their distinctive sounds and global appeal—Clark makes music for that same utopia, but with a distinct, contemporary twist.

"My music is real because it has to be, it's about my life because it has to be," Clark says of his approach. "I don't see any other way."

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Steven A. Clark grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a military town best known as the home of the Army's Fort Bragg. Naturally introverted — he was named "Most Quiet" in his high-school yearbook- Clark found his outlet while studying at North Carolina's High Point University; music took hold of his focus.

Sensing that his artistic opportunities in small-town Carolina were limited, Clark chased his ambitions to Miami and began to explore and challenge his boundaries. The creative result of this period was an EP called Stripes. While Clark was gaining musical footing, he found himself on a personal precipice, falling in and out of love. He channeled the emotions from that relationship and subsequent breakup into his next release, Fornication Under Consent of the King. Behind the playful, suggestive title was an even more mature and coherent effort, bonded by Clark's own ethereal production and frank, inward-looking lyrics.

After some time in the studio and much soul searching, Clark stepped back out with LATE a 3 song EP for Secretly Canadian. As with previous releases, Clark wrote all of the music and self-produced the majority of it, bringing in composer Sam Hyken to add string arrangements to songs such as "Lonely Roller" and "Just Ride." Dancing in the spaces between a young Peter Gabriel's transparent, generous vision for musical pop art, and Anthony Hamilton's classically tinged R&B, LATE is just the beginning for Clark, a prelude to his fresh, captivating perspective.

"I'm growing as a musician but in the way I live my life, I'm still kind of wondering and searching," Clark says of his latest project. "I still feel like I have to share this part of my life… These records are a personal story of true love for the first time, and not being ready for it, and not wanting it. They embody how I feel about love, and my approach to life and making music."


It's difficult to say where Night Beds begins, but it could be here: August 2006, a young Winston Yellen is invited to a longtime friend's apartment. They talk, they record a little aimlessly, and something exciting emerges. Maybe it's a little later, when one is studying engineering in Nashville, and the other remains behind, an unhappy captive of secondary education. It could be any number of moments, really, along a series of migrations, but probably here: the summer of 2008, back in Colorado Springs, when they write the first Night Beds song, "You Were Afraid."
God knows that we try to do the best we can
After that there is a lot of time spent in basements, a lot of alcohol, a lot of irreverent tuning, but not all that much need for talk. Most things are shared, understood: in thin mountain air, or in a waterlogged summer atmosphere, there can be a sense that breathing is effortful, that sleep is easy but not restful. The songs that come out of those first few years, collected on three EPs (Night Beds, Every fire; Every joy, and Hide From It), are an exercise in catharsis. They're deeply ringing things, washed in whiskey. The sound is like something emergent from a tunnel. It may be the red eye of a cigarette in the dark, or it may be the dawn peeking out.
Somewhere we might find softer light
"It was never thought. It just was always what felt good." So the songs come together over acoustic guitars, over the first skeletal melodies, and then they grow. Yellen's voice takes on a pure kind of thirst when wrapped in the sonic landscapes he devises. It's searching. It's taken several years to map everything out, but after a hiatus spent driving the deserts and prairies and coastal roads of the United States, sleeping in a hatchback or on friendly couches - after a long time spent alone - Night Beds has found a home in Nashville. Soon it will see the release of Country Sleep, a full-length album in the spirit of the vagabond, in the winding path to a place of good rest.