David Borné’s debut full-length album, GENESIS, follows the Nashville-based singer-songwriter on a path of healing: death, rebirth, and beginning again. “There’s a mystery in the middle of the hole in your chest, a riddle you’re dying to solve. Pay attention, listen, the thing you’re missing has been with you all along,” he says in “Clarity,” a line that summarizes the soul-searching on GENESIS well. Ethereal grit weaves throughout 13 songs produced by Jarrad K (Ruston Kelly, Lucie Silvas, Elohim) and engineered by Grammy winner Gena Johnson (John Prine, Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton). Borné also worked with a cast of impressive supporting musicians: a duet with Bre Kennedy, another with Hadley Kennary, Chris Powell (Brandi Carlile, The Highwomen, Sturgill Simpson) on drums, Lydia Luce on strings, and Liana Alpino on harp.

 

“I like the idea we can be our brother’s keepers and our sister’s believers, and we will be released,” he sings on the album’s first single, “I Like The Idea,” an inclusive, upbeat jaunt celebrating life’s goodness: the idea that love is all around us and that “hope is a chameleon that can blend in with the ceiling, but it’s never truly lost,” a song Borné calls his “gravestone song” because it so closely recounts what’s important to him. “Healing and growth is not a straight line so the album plays a lot off the notion that joy and suffering, light and dark, learning and unlearning all take each other,” Borné says, and adopting that perspective may just be the key to truly starting over.