THE BIG EASY

“I want you to HEAR the room… to be SURROUNDED by the song.” So enthuses Stephen Berthomieux of his latest recordings under the moniker The Big Easy. These ten new songs, which will arrive on the new album (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, are living and breathing documents. Snapshots of someone coming to terms with their mistakes, facing up to the future, and finally learning to be comfortable.

Berthomieux approaches these subjects with a commitment to let the songs unveil themselves in composition. Indie rock, emo, and punk influences are artfully woven together in arrangements that jangle, shake, kick out, and search inwards. The results are deceptively complex and strikingly immediate songs that often eschew traditional verse-chorus-verse formats.

The Big Easy has operated as a rotating cast of musicians around Berthomieux since its teen genesis in northern New Jersey, and following him to his current home of Brooklyn, New York. It’s No Secret is the follow up to 2020's A Long Year (released via Forged Artifacts) and retains drummer Pete Clark from that era of the group. On production duties they tapped A Long Year mixing engineer, and New Jersey scene legend, Erik Kase Romero (Front Bottoms guitarist, recording engineer for Gaslight Anthem, The Bouncing Souls and many more).

To record It’s No Secret, the duo holed up at Romero’s studio in central Jersey for two weeks in the dead of winter. For Berthomieux, this exodus from the bustle of Brooklyn was essential to the process. A chance to clear his head of noise and to be grounded in open space. Indeed ‘space’ is at the heart of these new compositions. In comparison to previous Big Easy outings, there is a deliberate embracing of quietness across a spectrum that runs from small moments of total silence, through hushed strumming, to barely contained simmering frustration. These glimpses between the notes draw the listener into an album that is alive. The attitude and emotions resonating in the spaces.

Lead-off single “Kind Of Dream” offers the perfect bridge into the latest incarnation of The Big Easy. The track was written during the album rollout of A Long Year, and sonically carries both the raw energy of that record and the purposeful restraint of It’s No Secret. Lyrically it opens the door to Berthomieux’s reflections on regret, hindsight, and the type of realization that spawned the album title.

Despite a back catalog of singles and EPs that reach back to 2016, It’s No Secret is the first release from The Big Easy that Berthomieux has felt comfortable putting his face on. His previous refusal was something he’d ostensibly put down to a disavowal of vanity. Over time, he came to the wrenching realization that he’d felt that his blackness might be off-putting to fans of the genres he works within. Genres which have been predominated by white bodies for so long.

While the current rock scene is arguably as diverse as it has ever been, it was a different world that Berthomieux entered in his teens as he played Jersey rec centers and cafés before starting to explore options in NYC. Wherever he played, it was common that he was the only black person in the room. Over the years he realized that he felt like an interloper. Someone more apart than a part of the scene. It was part of a wider awakening that he was having about his place in the world.

To explain, he references the James Baldwin quote “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time”.  He was becoming increasingly aware of the hurt he had been silently carrying, of his underlying mental health issues that he’d always thought were just “things that other people had”.

As he prepares to share It’s No Secret with the world, Berthomieux boldly asserts his identity whilst baring previously buried parts of his soul. In his own words, “It’s No Secret is my journal… a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud.”

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