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Bare Hallways

by Hiroki Tanaka

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about

When I first started thinking about this project, my sister had already recorded a lot of my grandmother talking and singing folk songs or hymns. My sister sent me the recording of my grandmother singing “Jesus Tender Shepherd Hear Me”, and I suppose I felt inspired to create something about this experience based on that recording.

Bare Hallways was written as I was reflecting on my experience as a caregiver for my grandmother, and the feeling that everything was slowly falling apart. My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was inevitably growing worse, the house was falling into disrepair, and the family had started the very necessary process of clearing out what items they could get away with, without sending my grandmother into a panic.

There’s this dichotomy between the menial and tender tasks that were required of me as a caregiver in the verses, and then the refrain of the chorus “In The End”. I think I couldn’t look away at the truth of it, that death is isolating and painful. That there was an inevitable ugliness to it that you needed to accept.

A lot of this album is about confronting the difficult aspects of dying, and attempting to find grace and solace in the pain that death causes.

lyrics

Hear me
Save her memory
In the Hallway
Calling for me

I see the shadow
Of her past rising
Small hands shaking
It's cold and lonely

In the end
In the end
In the end
In the end
In the end

Making
Her bed each evening
Softly speaking
I put her to sleep

In the house that
I was born in
Watching crumble
Into bare hallways

In the end
In the end
In the end
In the end

credits

released September 25, 2020
Hiroki Tanaka - Guitar, Vocals, Piano, Found sounds, recorder
Matthew Bailey - Producer, Recording Engineer, Bass, synth
Michael Eckert - Pedal Steel
Zaynab Wilson - Drums, percussion

Mixed by Amy Kathryn Fort
Mastered by Reuben Ghose

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Hiroki Tanaka Toronto, Ontario

Hiroki Tanaka is releasing his debut solo album, Kaigo Kioku Kyoku (which translates into “Caregiving Memory Songs”).

Built from his experience as a caregiver for his grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and uncle with terminal cancer, Kaigo Kioku Kyoku makes music out of meaningful objects, voice recordings of his relatives, and are structured off of hymns and Japanese folk songs. ... more

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