Growing Closer

“Los Angeles is a city where everything is available at arms length, a technicolor mirage where the more you close in on things, the further away they seem. Built on a fault line in the desert, the city exists on a singular foundation of dreams and stardust fantasy. The promise of this impossible oasis draws dreamers and drifters, whose hopes in turn weave themselves into the city’s fabric of ouroboric self-mythology.

This is a greeting and farewell. After almost 5 years, I’ve recently bid adieu to Los Angeles, and with the city now in the rear vision mirror, it seems fitting to send this music into the world; another onion-layer for a myth left behind.”

Growing Closer is the second album from Australian musician Prudence Rees-Lee. Inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, it’s an album about potential, yearning, missed connections and burgeoning intimacy; shifting realities, thin veils and heartbreaks radiate with every lilting refrain.

With nods to the thoughtful pop craft of Southland luminaries like The Carpenters, Burt Bacharach and the Wrecking Crew, Growing Closer is a record equally punctuated by specter of LA’s odd-ball pop penumbra — names like Dory Previn, Judee Sill, Scott Walker. From the gently devastating lyricism of Nothing but A State of Mind to the blistering tropicalia guitar solo ushering in Ride and the cinematic brio of After the Moon, the album’s broad palette confidently belies its 35 minute runtime.

With Growing Closer, Prudence delivers a love letter to the outsider’s pop fantasy — a decisive simulacrum of singer-songwriter reveries from a 1970s of her own imagining. One of the most captivating albums of recent times.