100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #53 Daniel Rossen – Shadow In the Frame

Released: 2022

In an age where you can be hauled off the street just for being from somewhere someone doesn’t like, in an era where stupidity is a career, in a moment where talent is a purely redundant quality to demonstrate, why, isn’t virtuosity dangerous?

Daniel Rossen used to sing in Grizzly Bear, a group who never quite managed to convince themselves that they were anything as trivial as a noughties Brooklynite indie band, although on 2009’s Veckatimest they did a damn fine impression of one. During the hiatus which came after the 2017 release of Painted Ruins Rossen busied himself with relocating to Santa Fe, parenthood and producing almost singlehandedly his first solo album You Belong There.

Shadow In The Frame began with neo classical eddies and a picked guitar that tempo galloped in the style of early Nick Drake, whilst the blips of uncertainty in Rossen’s tremulous voice added a vulnerable quality that ached. In interview he’d spoken of the material drawing on the environment of his old home in upstate New York, but the motifs are surely Latin, warm and sudden, romantic and profoundly deep. Here we were, in the hands of a virtuoso at the peak of his powers; in this time, the most dangerous place to be of all.