1,000 Masks is a new album release from California-based singer-songwriter Brynna Campbell. Its title track, whose themes run throughout the album, is a quick-paced and racing meditation on the various roles we inhabit throughout the course of a day, and the corresponding masks we wear to communicate these roles to the world around us. The result is an energetic sprint of a song that inspires the listener to reflect on their own mask-wearing, and the seemingly endless chase we are all on to maintain a successful balancing act for the needs of others, of our immediate selves, and of our individual ego dragons that never sleep.
In part, most of the album’s seventeen tracks swim through waters of the inner mind. Brynna Campbell offers a wry yet sensitive voice depicting the female experience amidst wistful piano lines that offer hope among somberness. Her musical character is in the spirit of intelligent chanteuses such as Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, but with two feet planted firmly in 2022 and in full view of the year’s trials and tribulations.
Many of the songs’ voices are full of angst that only a pandemic era could have inspired, or at least brought out into the light—thoughts previously half in shadow. There is social anxiety (the title track) and a standout on the album,“Party” which cleverly articulates the tug of war that goes on inside the mind of a person who does—and does not—want to go into the party, and who focuses a great deal of energy amid the song’s chorus with the mantra “just get out of the car.” The songwriting brings to mind Andy Shauf’s similarly focused “Early to the Party,” yet offers a fresh female perspective.
Perhaps the strongest track on 1,000 Masks is the album opener “Unbroken,” a whimsical song that beautifully articulates the quiet power of the eternal endurance of the spirit which, even when pitted against such foes as a globe-changing pandemic and the dark and despairing feelings it may have inspired in its wake, cannot be smothered out. The light is perpetually turned on and perhaps seems even brighter amidst this darkest dark.
“Unbroken” is about having faith in what you cannot see, and about the power in affirming your own existence, rather than relying on the experience of Being Seen, something that so many of us were completely deprived us during the earliest self-quarantine moments of the first pandemic year. Campbell, a talented animator as well, created a far-out, tripped-out animated music video to accompany this track and another one too, “Untethered.” This song covers similar compositional territory to “Unbroken,” reflecting upon human loneliness and seeking companionship, or at least connection to fellow human beings, most of whom are in intense relationships with their own smartphones.
This reviewer’s favorite track, sonically speaking, is “Dragon,” the fantastical and romantic observational tale that anthropomorphizes a dragon on the prowl during a night out. An aural landscape of ebbing and flowing, moody and eerie sound effects that in part mimics a beating heart, the song concocts an evocative “chase scene” between two parties.
Other tracks like “Be a Man” further highlight Campbell’s sensitivity as a writer, articulating and reflecting upon the roles others are forced to play. In the wake of the Trump era when the weaker sides of masculinity perhaps appeared more blatant, “Be a Man” neither condones nor rails against men, but instead uses the catchphrase to gently encourage males to become more comfortable with the complexity and fluidity of such an identity. “Drought” too seeks to clarify what true strength consists of, confirming that at least from Campbell’s perspective, caring does not weaken a person.
