![]() If you can play, you can play, and that’s what counts. As I got older and fell in love with music, I realized that performing was an opportunity to transcend my disability, to not have that be the first thing people noticed about me. “My greatest fear was that I would be known as ‘The Blind Kid,’ and I didn’t want to carry that label with me my whole life. “Growing up, I didn’t want to deal with the vision stuff,” he reflects. It’s a journey that Norwood, who’s legally blind, has been charting for much of his life. Norwood writes with a raw, unflinching honesty here, grappling with isolation, doubt, and depression as he artfully documents the long and winding journey to self-discovery and acceptance. While the performances on ‘Out Of The Sea’ are often delivered with a tender touch, the record’s dreamy atmosphere belies its intense emotional punch. Blending gentle, understated arrangements with virtuosic musicianship, the collection hints at everything from Leonard Cohen and Richard Thompson to Elliott Smith and Harry Nilsson as it showcases both Norwood’s remarkable three-and-a-half octave vocal range and his deft, unassuming fretwork. Recorded with acclaimed producer/engineer Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Phish) and mixed by John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth), Norwood’s gorgeous and heart-wrenching debut, ‘Out of the Sea,’ represents just a fraction of the music he wrote during that tumultuous period. “When I got back to New York, I started writing my own songs for the first time in probably a decade, and that’s what kept me going that whole first year as the divorce went through.” “That was the time when music meant the most to me,” he reflects. Reconnecting with his true identity as an artist, Norwood began performing regularly for the first time in years and penned a torrent of new songs that embraced the authentic self he’d nearly forgotten. ![]() When his marriage started to fall apart, though, he returned to New York for a trial separation, and he instinctively found himself gravitating back towards music as a survival mechanism, as a way to work through the heartbreak and loneliness and confusion of it all. So Norwood got married, enrolled in grad school, and moved to Italy for a year before settling down in DC. “I decided I should get a ‘real’ job and just let music be my hobby.” “I fell in love with a painter, and it seemed like if we wanted to have any kind of a stable life with a house and kids someday, we couldn’t both be allergic to money,” he laughs. After earning his living as a sideman in New York City for most of his twenties, Graham Norwood decided to leave music behind, at least in the professional sense. ![]()
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March 2023
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