Broadtexter Weekly

The thing that really stands out to me about Patrick Bloom is his rhyming patterns.  They’re completely original, incredibly complicated, and yet sound totally natural.  One of my favorite rhyming patterns is on  ’Queen of Oklahoma’ where he rhymes BUSTED with RUSTED and then ends with an open-ended, un-rhymed GO.  On the next line he rhymes CHECKS with BREAKS FIXED (which, by the way, would have been enough if he just used FIXED, but he added BREAKS) and then tops the entire thing off by referencing back to that open GO and rhymes it with TOLEDO!  A perfect rhyme, none the less.  This is the kind of masterful songwriting that you rarely hear these days.  You’ll hear it in an artists like Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Steve Earle, and maybe a handful of other contemporary songwriters, but, for the most part, folks with this kind of talent are few and far between.

The thing I like most about Bloom’s song ‘Don’t Come Back’ is that it has a true chorus.  The verses have incredible movement to them, like classic chord progressions that you’d have heard on Carole King’s Tapestry album or Carly Simon’s No Secrets record.  This song has the simplicity of the song ‘Our House’ On CSNY’s classic 1970’s album Deja Vu.  I love the harmony vocal of the female singer on this track…which I can only assume is Megan Valencia.  I’m also a sucker for a song that opens with the lyric YOU ALWAYS SEEM TO NEED YOUR SPACE / SO GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY PLACE.

For fans of Paul Simon and fellow Broadtexter artist David Mead, I would recommend checking out the song ‘Julianna’ on Bloom’s Myspace page.  When I dig a little deeper into the bio of Patrick Bloom, it’s no wonder that I see the type of critical acclaim that he has received over the years.  Patrick’s latest CD charted #10 on the Roots Music Folk Chart and #14 on the Euro Americana Chart.  Bloom was chosen by CDBaby.com as an Editor Pick and was also selected as a runner up in the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival Songwriter Showcase.  

Patrick Bloom has migrated from the black dirt of Iowa, through the housing projects of East Los Angeles, and the working class industry of Long Island’s Southern Shore.  All of these different life experiences seem to seep into the writing and rhyming of this great songwriter.  This is an artist who deserves a good hard listen.