Andrew Bryant and I behold different nights. 

Haloes on dimmer switches prod Bryant from a church meeting, into the North Mississippi velvet; his eyes don’t blink but open wide, an S.E. Hinton sentence in reverse. Magnolias yield sweetness to what otherwise fades, darkening edges of cypress and pine disappearing till Monday morning. 

Still south but now west, I leave an air-conditioned sanctuary for Arizona’s black-on-tan, like some lesser Rothko, the paint too thin for the master’s assent. Scrub cactus and leafy ash keep safe distance from copycat corners of another manicured lot.

Andrew Bryant and I harbor the same secret knowledge. 

Both our younger selves stepped through consecrated evenings, questions hanging overhead like stars, our descendants as numerous as Abraham’s. Minutes before, we peered over instruments dedicated for worship, playing closing cadences, reading whispering lips. Elders passed messages of anointing, of when and where it settles. They talked about us. 

Everything common and strange across these Sunday stories emerges on Prodigal, Bryant’s late-2023 album. These 11 hymns will resonate with anyone who ever bothered the ghosts in a churchyard cemetery or read scenes from Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain only to feel the church organ vibrate the page and their bones. 

Bryant is quietly building a rare canon, one that deepens with Prodigal. A set like 2021’s A Meaningful Connection bears the overtone pining and heartbeat pulse of a songwriter who wants the second half of his life to be better for everyone within earshot. Ain’t It Like the Cosmos, a standout from 2017, raises Southern-rock guitars to clear paths through the wilds of the past. 

Every Bryant record between and before defies the most popular description of important art in our age by flinching—How can a body do otherwise in the face of all this pain and beauty? the music asks. Then his songs present their inside-out case for reconciliation anyhow. 

Astute listeners trace Bryant’s sound back to Water Liars at least. Composing that band’s core with Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster, the pair delivered searing melancholy stolen from sundry gods: Bukowski, the Catholic poets, Jason Molina. They made a marriage, not of fire and ice so much as crackling flame and sighing ember, trading parts within a song or even a measure. 

Prodigal remains bound to Molina’s influence and, as Bryant notes, revelations passed down from Kafka. With these artists on his shoulders, he relives his fundamentalist upbringing, only to realize neither cleaving nor clinging is the proper verb for his relationship with the past. Prodigals live in many bodies pointed in many directions; we have so much to run toward and from. 

Brokering some manner of peace means walking home once again, sifting what may still be saved and what must be left for good. After all, “The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes,” as Kafka said in words speaking to the heart of Bryant’s matters. 

Prodigal opens with the title track and Bryant singing straight to me. 

“When your father is a son of God, and you are the son of the son,” he begins, and my coming-of-age questions return, flooding the baptistry to my ankles, my chest, then up to my neck:

Where do I stand with the Trinity, with this infinity loop of fathers and sons? What place does an Arizona preacher’s kid occupy in God’s family, knowing spirit runs thicker than blood?

“A brother is a brother and to doubt / it is a creek you have to cross,” Bryant continues, picking up the conditional, nodding my direction. “Like the Prodigal who never left at all.”

“Trampoline” follows, a diary of childhood ecstasies and casual encounters with Christ, little raptures you never quite shake. A slight harmonic hitch in the turnaround is enough to stagger and prepare the way of the Lord. But Bryant plays it cool, allowing the song to naturally swell and surround him. 

The arrangement forms a reminder that, in nearly every way that matters, Bryant’s Mississippi exists somewhere between David Bazan’s Western world and Springsteen’s East Coast. 

A grown-folks analog arrives next with “Tongues.” Fearless horns and impossibly cool stabs of organ propel Bryant’s narrator through a fevered fugue. When he sings, Sunday-best collars turn up and tables turn over, each gesture an act of defiant discernment. The seeker needs to know if they’re safe within the beloved community or outside peering through stained glass.

“I see you playing cards with the King of Kings / But y’all don’t look at me,” Bryant sings, ready to pluck the Holy Spirit from the atmosphere and seize a spiritual birthright if it comes to that.  

“I Am the Wind” sounds like a soul softly straining to live in unity with everything, then tripping over a lifetime of questions prepared for you, broken and passed out like bread. 

“What is this nature I must solve? / What’s the question—I’m so sorry I forgot,” Bryant sings over chords passing slowly like clouds. 

Met by the sound of his own voice, then a piano’s punctuation, Bryant’s final refrain discovers solidarity in soul upon soul, sound on sound. Gently bound together, all those wanting to move like the wind, to sing “the song inside the song inside the heart,” finally form something greater than themselves.

The more notes Bryant sings, the softer Prodigal becomes, at least narratively. He casts characters before us—spiritual big brothers and kind, sentinel grandmothers, baristas whose vanishing opens the door to living parables—and shows how each belongs together, bleeds into something shared. 

Bryant is the wounded dove, grounded and longing to lift toward peace, as well as the Mississippi kid awaiting the dove’s heart his mother will smother in gravy “in a skillet alone at the stove.” Listening and humming along, we play these parts too. All are wandering children; all forbearing fathers embracing the bruised, misunderstood parts of ourselves. 

Album closer “Americano” chases that prodigal barista into something like jubilee—“Today everything is on the house”—and something like caretaking, tending to everything left undone.

This final image, of a poet sweeping the floor and closing down a shop he didn’t open, doesn’t own, drives Bryant’s quiet revelations around the block one more time, then home. Revisiting the past doesn’t have to end in a clean fracture or some shameful return. 

After all, Prodigal never sounds like a damning. Rather, these 11 songs resound like old categories growing strangely dim, old questions deciding they no longer require answers, old souls becoming young for the first time. Less like strangers to ourselves, to every element cohering inside, we become less beholden to the former creeds.  

The prodigal journey, as Bryant sings it, ends at a more compassionate communion table, with a truer saying of grace. There, people who once broke us open are invited to break bread; past and present versions of ourselves sit side by side, murmuring their own kind of prayers. 

There, a younger Bryant reflexively lays church-choir harmonies beneath new melodies, upholding phrases such as “I thought I knew a thing or two / About how everything works / But I don’t know shit … about certainty.”

And I touch elbows with my former chosen one. Once he breathed Arizona air; now he breathes out relief. He inches closer to a man no longer shouldering the weight of the past but growing into his comfort with mysteries, basking in soft light given off by constellations of I-don’t-knows. Each prodigal needs the other on their way in and out of this forever becoming. 

Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He writes a regular column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, HAD, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and more. Find more of his work at https://aarikdanielsen.com/.