Singer/songwriter Brie Stoner is empowered and emboldened on her dreamy debut album ‘Me Veo,’ an achingly intimate and soul-stirring sonic blanket of self-actualization, inward connection, and spiritual release.
for fans of Lana Del Rey, Victoria Bigelow, Mitski
Stream: “Me Veo” – Brie Stoner
‘Me Veo’ is, I suppose, that fiat discovery of seeing myself at last in that way as a woman who is so much more than one thing, and committed to embodying a powerful vulnerability in every part of my life.
Brie Stoner begins her debut album with a beautiful, soul-stirring invitation.
“Honey, if you want me, come and find me,” she beckons. “I’m not running, but I’m not still; I’m in myself, you see. It’s taken a long time to arrive in my own body as I will.” Her voice aches with raw emotion, hot on the mic like a whisper in the ear as she both basks and dwells in a moment of clarity, vulnerability, and self-empowerment. The Spanish phrase “Me veo” translates in English to “I see myself,” and in her debut album, Stoner revels in an intimate space of self-discovery, self-actualization, and inward connection.
Having finally found herself after being still for so long, the Spanish-American singer/songwriter is ready for everything and anything the world sends her way. Come and find her on Me Veo, a softly soothing and breathtakingly bold record of realization, reckoning, reflection, and spiritual release.
Honey, If you want me
Come and find me
I’m not running, but I’m not still.
I’m in myself you see.
It’s taken me a long time
To arrive in my own body as I will.
Boy, you’re driving so fast
It’s enough to make a scene…
Leaving those tracks
as you burn through town.
But handling fast
gets to me like Jimmy Dean
I’ll hop on the back, take me for a ride…
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering Me Veo, the warm, wild, and wondrous debut album from Madrid-born, Grand Rapids, Michigan-based multicultural, multilingual singer/songwriter, visual artist, and author Brie Stoner.
A dreamy, hazy, multi-dimensional collection produced by David Vandervelde (Father John Misty), Me Veo captures an artist coming into themselves, finding their voice, and harnessing their inner light after languishing in the darkness for far too long. It’s a mellifluous, melancholic exhale: Thirteen tender, sweetly seductive songs find Stoner plunging into the depths of her humanity, meditating on identity, freeing herself from labels, and celebrating “the myriad, mystical threads that make up the whole cloth of the human spirit.”
“This album was really conceived when I decided to turn my life around during the pandemic,” Stoner tells Atwood Magazine. “Like so many of us, the pandemic afforded me the opportunity to really evaluate what matters to me, and what it is that I wanted to do with my life moving forward. For so much of life I felt like I had to choose between either/or’s: Between being an artist or academic pursuits, being from Spain or being American, being fleshy and human or spiritual, being a mother or being a lover.”
“All of that time in solitude really gave me the opportunity to begin to heal those internal rifts and come home to myself as being both/and. I feel in many ways it’s a record about discovering that everything can and does belong in me, and can harmonically co-exist in a way that feels really fulfilling and empowering. It’s one thing to discover that kind of creative clarity and make a bunch of shit… but it’s another thing to discover that inexhaustible creative force and learn how to wield it in a way that makes you a more kind, loving, and joyful person. Me Veo is, I suppose, that fiat discovery of seeing myself at last in that way as a woman who is so much more than one thing, and committed to embodying a powerful vulnerability in every part of my life.”
“It’s an album that has been a lifetime in the making,” she adds. “My dear friend David Vandervelde produced it, and I think it demonstrates the level of collaboration and artistic trust between us. We’ve been playing music together since we were teenagers, so we share the same landscape of influences and creative orientation. I demoed out these songs with my ’69 Gibson Hummingbird, and played the harmonica and bells and piano… even sketches of drum takes. And a lot of that wound up staying in the album (not my drumming, thank god). David’s sensitivity and taste, as well as our shared history together just made it so easy to bring these songs to life. At this point it feels like we can finish each other’s sentences musically and know the reference points well enough to just really trust each other’s instincts which is just incredibly gratifying. He really is an immense talent and I’m so grateful to work with him.”
It’s a record about discovering that everything can and does belong in me, and can harmonically co-exist in a way that feels really fulfilling and empowering.
Making this album was an exercise in self-expression and nostalgia for Stoner, who found herself dwelling in and longing for the past (both lived and imagined) as she brought these songs to life.
“I was walking around the house a lot in vintage silk kimonos… feeling incredibly homesick for Europe and listening to a lot of old records I hadn’t heard in a long time,” she recalls. “Serge Gainsbourg was ones such re-connect for me. I remember that time was this twilight zone melancholia of days blending together, of feeling so totally unmoored. So I just started following the oxygen of my desire, of what felt good to me and was enlivening.”
“I started painting again, I went through boxes of old black and white photography postcards from the ‘60s that I had collected and put them on my desk as mood inspiration, wore the silk kimono’s and then… started writing these songs that matched all that longing, silky sensuality and unfurling that was taking place inside me. I definitely had a mood that I wanted to convey on this record…and I started writing in Spanish and French because there are just some feelings that get lost in translation.”
She candidly describes Me Veo as an “erotic sigh of surrender.”
The album’s title comes from the track of the same name. “It’s one of the songs on the record, so there’s that angle of what that specific song is communicating: A long journey of moving from external points of validation to an internal sense of my non-contingent worth and freedom. But I was also really inspired by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough.” When he says:
“I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.”
“That image really struck with me… of holding that mirror, and of not staying folded in anywhere but having the courage to really bloom and unfold fully.”
Highlights abound on the enchanting journey from “Honey” to “Magdalene” as Stoner opens her heart and soul up to herself and anyone who cares to listen. Both bookends themselves shine through radiant melodies and Stoner’s lyrical intentionality; together with other previously released singles like “Hungry,” “Bloom,” and “Love Me Like a Weapon,” they capture the depth and richness of her blossoming artistry.
But they only scratch the surface of who Stoner is and what her debut album captures and expresses.
“For me they all just feel like one cohesive story,” Stoner says. “The songs that really showcase David’s genius are really evident on his iconic guitar solos… Tunes like ‘Honey,’ ‘Soledad,’ ‘Me Veo,’ and ‘Magdalene.’ But they’re no more special than the catchy groove of songs like ‘Hungry,’ which has been a total dark horse on the album. I don’t think David and I could have ever anticipated — as much as we both loved that song and how breezy and effortless it felt — that that song would wind up on Ralph Lauren’s runway or get as much love as it has been getting.”
“I would say that there are real trap doors hidden throughout these songs that dive into much deeper waters than you might guess initially,” she says of her lyrics. “There’s a lot of sensuality and love and heartbreak. But I reference Rilke, Mary Oliver, Thomas Merton, mythology and historical figures in this record, and I guess I’m not concerned with whether or not people catch the reference or get to those deeper waters. I’m more interested with conveying the feeling. I will say I’m quite proud of managing to use ‘tehomic’ in a lyric though!”
All told, Me Veo is the mesmerizing musical manifestation of Brie Stoner’s soul-searching journey: An adventure that led her to see herself as so much more than the sum of her parts alone.
“Really, I just hope that listeners feel taken into a landscape of longing that mirrors their own intensity, their own desires and their own hope,” Stoner shares. “It’s a tremendous honor for me to be making music because I feel like it’s such magic… Ultimately when we connect with a song or an album, what we’re feeling is the resonance of feeling less alone in our feelings, of being seen. So, in that way I hope this album, which is all about my learning to fully see myself, creates that mirroring for listeners to see themselves reflected as well.”
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Brie Stoner’s Me Veo EP with Atwood Magazine as she takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of her debut album!
Me Veo is out everywhere May 3, 2024!
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:: stream/purchase Me Veo here ::
:: connect with Brie Stoner here ::
Stream: “Me Veo” – Brie Stoner
:: Inside Me Veo ::
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Honey
Honey was perhaps the first song I wrote on the album, and it was the beginning of setting a whole trajectory of longing and sensual sigh’s of relief at feeling like I was finally coming home to myself in a sweet, golden, and sticky way. For me it was this idea that what I have arrived at as a woman has taken years to develop, and is the product of a lot of inner work and of freeing myself from the impulses to please anyone but myself. So its in that reckoning that I feel I am finally able to be “in myself” as I sing about, and neither be running, or standing still. This comfortable place of receptivity and creativity in me that really has nothing to prove, and feels confident and comfortable “to be in my own body as I will.”
Hungry
Hungry is all about the first flush of desire, about the insatiability of not being able to keep your hands off a new love. It’s really about not being afraid of the frustration of longing…of staying with it, and letting the tension build. For me the song captures an unapologetic stance in being able to own that desire fully, which feels true of how I feel I am inhabiting the rest of my life.
Loved Me Like a Weapon
Loved Me Like A Weapon details the experience of being gaslit in a toxic relationship both personal and institutional. I wrote this song about the hall of bendy mirrors that created in the confusion of a broken heart. I have experienced this romantically and professionally (sometimes both at once) in ways that have left me shattered and taken a long time to heal from… “searching across scattered photographs” trying to sort what is real and not real. Its messy and painful work, and requires the courage to get sliced by the edges along the way as we pick up the pieces of ourselves and try to heal.
Unfinished Business
This song is a permission granting between lovers…I guess I really just was in a place in my life where I was moving into a more conditionless approach to gifting love in a more generous and un-controlling way. I reference greek mythology and the “tehomic deep” to try to recapture the magic of letting things be wild and uncontrolled…of not rushing to colonize everything with expectations and certitudes.
Bloom
Bloom is a silky soft petal sigh of feeling and longing…of really being completely taken by someone who in my own life made me feel a deeper permission to be myself, to open and unfurl. Its a rare thing to meet someone who can do that just by their presence, and for me its something that I mark as part of what allowed so many of these songs to emerge in the bloom of my own life.
Me Veo
Me Veo, the title track off the album, is one of the tunes that sonically points to my love of Serge Gainsbourg in the production and in the theatrical story telling in it. Really I’m exploring the ways I have had to navigate an industry that has become increasingly inhospitable to art and those who express it…and honestly it was kind of fun to create a bit of an operatic like drama about it. It also is pushing that question forward about where and how we find our worth: whether we acquiesce to looking outside ourselves in merit or whether we can have the courage to discover its in our own freedom from any maps of arrival or success.
Simmer
Simmer really is about discovering an absolute fulfilled contentment in my self, and shedding the idea that anyone out there “completes me”. I guess I have a bone to pick with Plato for making us believe that we are incomplete and need a soul mate…but I really feel this song tenderly because I wrote it as a love song to myself, honoring every cage I had to break myself free from to really “simmer and sigh” and allow my own gaze and view of myself to be enough.
Soledad
I wrote Soledad about the experience of truly facing one’s own demons in the midst of profound solitude and silence. Its inspired by the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, and references the ways I have moved out of any self- flaggelating beliefs of guilt or shame (nodding in my lyrics to the famed book by Thomas Merton, “Seven Story Mountain”), and expressing my desire instead to just come home to my humanity and letting the “animal body loves what it loves.”
San Cristobal
San Cristobal is a song about the dawning realization between two casual lovers who wind up—despite their best efforts—falling hard for each other. It also deals with the end of a dream of love…of the loss all the possible “might have beens”: the grief of letting go of what you glimpsed on the other side of the choice that wasn’t made to make it a reality.
Run
Run explores a particularly messy break up of a toxic dynamic that left me pretty shattered… and how at times those shattering edges keep cutting because we internalize the other person’s contempt. But for me this isn’t a classic villain / victim easy duality, but rather an exploration of the parts that I played in the dynamic…as well as naming a desire for a kinder way of being toward myself, of no longer running/working/trying so hard to arrive at some impossible perfection that I always felt I had to reach for in my life.
No One’s to Blame
I really wanted to end the album with a surrender of letting go and forgiving reality for being what it is and for the choices and heart breaks that ultimately formed part of leading me to this moment. Its not a bypass of responsibility that I’m alluding to, nor is it romanticizing the real pain and suffering that we experience, but rather is a statement of resilience in moving into my own freedom. Sometimes heartbreak and awful shit happens…and at least for me I don’t find any creative energy in staying locked into victim/oppressor binaries. I find that part of my homecoming into truly seeing myself has been because I’ve stepped beyond that impasse. Which I think honestly requires more courage…but also yields more creative freedom and joy too.
Magdalene
Magdalene is my confessional: my most raw and furious telling of my experience growing up in the confines of a conservative christian childhood. The song is my liberation manifesto, a feminine unapologetic genuflection to being fleshy and feeling and free from the confines of patriarchal, pontifical ideologies.
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:: stream/purchase Me Veo here ::
:: connect with Brie Stoner here ::
Stream: “Me Veo” – Brie Stoner
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