Neal Adelman Releases Debut Album Soon
The singer-songwriter and playwright alumnus makes his recording debut, gathering a decade of songs into one album, with a hometown concert at the Bookstore.
Performance & Beer. Every ticket purchase comes with one beer of choice following the performance from the neighboring Brick Street Brewery, located on the east end of our Bookstore’s block at 224 E 4th Ave. 50% of every ticket purchase is a direct contribution to our Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency nonprofit.
Neal relocated to Corsicana from Las Cruces, New Mexico last summer, purchasing and restoring a bungalow neighboring the residency’s founders near downtown. He has now released his debut album, Soon—a title that carries gentle yearning—its pared down compositions of guitar and vocals drawn from a decade of writing. A playwright by trade, Neal brings to his music the same instinct for pacing and cadence that defines his scripts, whose overlapping dialogue and rhythms are crafted to be read aloud. “I've always thought of plays as being very long songs,” he says.
Soon explores masculinity and its inheritance—the ways ideas of manhood gleaned from imperfect models are rarely questioned. “The Hurricane Song,” which took almost a decade to complete, traces a narrator’s uneasy reckoning with a father's influence, debt and potential damage writ large across decades of decisions. “Simple Truths” enters into conversation with the notion that the very elements that form our foundation (as sons, as men) can also become our limits. Layered and unguarded, Soon is comfortable with ambivalence.
Neal describes his songwriting process as welcoming of surprise and creative vicissitude and aimed at narrative scope. He credits his move to Corsicana with fueling growth: “Being part of a creative community should be as much a priority as the work itself,” he says, “feeding into it and receiving nurturing from it.” Neal will celebrate the album’s release with a ticketed concert at Bookstore, sharing the bill with fellow Texas singer-songwriters Cameron Smith and Kevin Johnson, whose equally layered songs will shine in the venue's intimate listening-room setting.
“I never intended to make this album,” Neal says. And yet, here it is.