FALCON BIO

When Brandy Zdan put the final touches on her third solo album, Falcon, she realized it captured a larger snapshot of her life than she ever intended to share. Equal parts proud and surprised, she sat down to pen a brief description in hopes of explaining how she got there. “Falcon is my story of the last two years,” she wrote. “A story of miscarriage, loss, grief, pregnancy, motherhood, trauma, isolation, depression, hope, and love. I gave birth in a pandemic, became a mother in isolation, pressed pause on my career, lost my livelihood, battled postpartum depression, and faced some of the darkest moments of life. Grand plans of big producers and fancy studios fell away, and I had to figure out a way of telling my story on my own.”

What happened next changed Zdan’s perspective on her album. When she shared the Falcon summary with a few colleagues and friends to hear their thoughts, a trend emerged. All of the men told her it was incredibly heavy. All of the women told her it was deeply inspiring. To Zdan, the reasons why couldn’t be more obvious.

“Everyone talks about being vulnerable, but there’s something different about this. This is the type of shit women aren’t supposed to be vocal about,” says Zdan. “I wanted to express all of those tangled feelings, and I hope that it encourages other women to express their grief and loneliness in whatever ways they choose. It’s a stigma that needs to end, and now that I’ve broken that barrier in my own life I want to help others experience what a freeing place it can be.”

In many ways, Falcon was a long time coming for Zdan, even if she didn’t know it. For the past decade, Zdan—a lifelong Canadian who moved to Austin, Texas in 2011 before relocating to Nashville, Tennessee in 2014—has been working in the US under a strict artist visa. She eventually found herself growing exhausted while touring in support of her 2018 sophomore album Secretear. “I was questioning myself as an artist and the endless years that I’ve been on the road pursuing what I do, making art, and feeling like it wasn’t giving me what I wanted it to be giving me anymore,” she explains. Suddenly, Zdan learned she was in the midst of her first pregnancy and needed to put the concerts on hold, marking the first time in a decade that she had ever done so. Instead of getting to enjoy her time off, Zdan was catapulted into the most formative experiences imaginable—the heavy grief of a miscarriage, the isolation of becoming a new mother in a pandemic, the unexpected realities of dealing with postpartum depression—during the past year. So she did what any great songwriter would do: she wrote her way through it. 

Essentially organized into three loose chapters chronologizing those moments, Falcon is a nine-song LP that finds Zdan grappling with the darkest lows of life through an inspiring and realistic lens. With the guidance of Patti Smith, Neil Young and above all Daniel Lanois serving as primary influences, Zdan expands her indie rock sound into an intuitive world of blues, folk pop, and sweeping harmonies. Creative touches like pedal steel and double-tracked vocals add texture throughout, though arguably the best addition is her brilliant use of layered guitar parts. 

“It’s almost like this warm blanket,” she says of her guitar layers. “I can do all sorts of tricks on guitar, but that’s the one I enjoy the most because it’s highly emotive in the most possible way. There’s so much feeling in big guitar swells, and I wanted people to understand that these songs are about intense subjects, but they can still find comfort within the music itself.”

Those soundscapes demand your attention from the start of Falcon thanks to opener “Dying Inside,” which sounds like a sunset-cloaked desert on a warm night. It’s intimate yet massive, and a perfect introduction for what follows suit afterwards. “The Worst Thing” sees Zdan wielding her electric guitar like a sword in a way that recalls the most determined Feist songs, all while addressing the culture norm of remaining silent about the tragic events that happen to women’s bodies. Then comes “Falcon’s Wing” which sees her ruminating on the intensity of pregnancy loss with rousing rock riffs that double as a call to arms. Even later on, during the slow-burning “Can You Be Alone,” she whips up gorgeous harmonizing guitar solos that boast an effortless pop hook. “By the way, I wrote that one way before the pandemic,” she laughs. “Turns out the question of whether you can be comfortable in your solitude has always been lingering around.”

By far the most impressive part of Falcon is the fact that Zdan not only wrote, played, and produced the entire album, but she engineered it by herself, too. After years of producing songs for other artists, she decided to finally attend an audio engineering class at night to fill in her formal educational gaps. During two-hour windows while her baby napped, Zdan recorded these songs in her tiny laundry room, laying down multiple takes, with new equipment she bought for the occasion. You would never be able to tell. Each track is unbelievably massive, and songs like “Everyone Wants” and “Canceleer” sound like they were recorded in top-tier studios. Zdan’s soundscapes draw out the subtle details of her instruments and melodies, almost akin to how a professional photographer can accurately capture the jaw-dropping beauty of nature.

“Too many times as women in the industry, we won’t call ourselves what we are until we are overqualified to do so. A dude who has 50% of the experience will say what he is, no problem,” she says. “I’m making a specific effort to say, ‘Yes, I am all of these things.’ I may not have formal training on large consoles in huge studios, but I made all of these songs sound the exact way I wanted them to sound in real time with limited tools. I didn’t just self-produce a record. I am an engineer.”

It’s not the hardship that Falcon blossomed from that sticks with you after listening to the album, but rather the unique liberation of disclosure it provides. That’s part of the reason why Zdan chose to name it Falcon in the first place. After flirting with the idea of calling it life/death/life, a reference to the cyclical nature of her experiences, Zdan instead took note of the symbolism surrounding her. While grappling with her miscarriage, she experienced a vision of a spirit floating up to the sky on a falcon’s wing. Shortly afterwards, she started to see a falcon fly throughout her neighborhood. Then, the week before her daughter was born, that falcon returned to perch on her property. The bird felt like an obvious icon for what her album stood for: strength despite size, gentle tenacity, and an ability to soar through the roughest weather. Listening to Falcon, those themes of perseverance and understated courage not only come through, but are so effective that it feels like you’re sitting there next to Zdan while she plays the album, recognizing those very traits within yourself and becoming part of a community that refuses to stay silent. “This album is a victory to overcoming almost every obstacle that can be thrown at a woman, mother, and musician,” she says, “and coming out on the other side intact and better for it.”

By Nina Corcoran