Drew Stroik tragically left the world three years ago, and it is therefore a bittersweet experience allowing the first song from his upcoming posthumous album to wrap itself so fully around your heart. Desert Time is clearly the work of a beautiful, quiet soul, and the music too is quietly beautiful- you can’t help but be drawn in by it.
A reclusive figure, there is a whispered, private quality to Desert Time that makes it seem as if we are intruding somehow on something too intimate. But Stroik was seemingly caught between a perpetual desire to have these songs heard and a need to keep them hidden. Desert Time captures that sonic paradox with sublime simplicity. Soporific strums of electric guitar chime with a hopeful yet undeniably narcotic hum beneath a melody that is as heartbreaking in its sense of yearning as it is beautiful. And that is what makes this music so utterly captivating and affecting – there is an ever-present hope interwoven within the longing, and it glows. It truly glows.
Playing a guitar he was given on his 12th birthday and a cheap Yamaha keyboard, songs poured out as naturally as breathing. We are told that there are hundreds of unreleased recordings that could have already reached so many had his life taken a different path. But as depression and addiction gripped ever tighter, that was not to be his story. Now, though, we are at least gifted the opportunity to enter Stroik’s striking sonic world in earnest, where fragility and beauty pervade and intertwine in perfect pop imperfection.
A biopic is set to be released next year, Drew Stroik – Unknown Pop Wizard. An apt title, though it’s hard to know what someone so seemingly gripped by self-doubt would make of such a newfound spotlight, someone whose peripatetic story seemed to be a means of escaping and finding himself in equal measure. But tragically, this is a question without an answer.
An indie pop ‘could have been’ – perhaps now his time has come. I truly hope it has – this is a voice that needs to be heard… to be loved…. to be remembered, despite its author’s tragic absence. His “lost album,” 65th and York—produced with Andy Chase (Desert Time’s co-writer) and Bruce Driscoll is set for release in October; until then, allow yourself some time in the desert. You won’t regret it.
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
