Focus Track “What Gave Me Away” Highlights Another Side of the Memphis Songwriter’s Unruly New Collection

Cory Branan releases his seventh studio album, You’ll Live, digitally today. The album, his second for the label, brings together ten songs written across nearly 20 years, finally giving a home to songs that never quite fit whatever record Branan was making at the time.

Click here to get the album/listen now.

Today’s focus track, “What Gave Me Away,” is another piece of that collection, joining songs that reveal the different directions Branan’s writing can take. Across You’ll Live, there are sprawling stories, punk-fueled bursts, atmospheric reflections and more intimate moments, with each song getting the treatment it calls for.

“This is an orphanage,” Branan says of the album, a reference to the long-shelved songs that ultimately found their way onto the same record.

Branan has never been interested in fitting neatly into a genre. Across a career spanning two decades, he has pulled from punk, folk, country, rock and Southern roots music, following the song rather than a particular sound. Rolling Stone calls him “a country boy with a punk-rock heart,” while NPR praised his “career stacked with lonesome country anthems to life on the road, delivered in a voice that’s pleasantly weathered.”

Produced by Anthony da Costa and recorded quickly in Nashville, You’ll Live includes the previously released “The Price and the Cost,” “Ricochet,” “Kathleen,” and “Steppin’ Outside,” featuring former tourmate Tyler Childers. Elsewhere, “The Wreck of the Sultana” unfolds as a ten-verse shipwreck ballad, “The Nothing I Know” takes an existential turn with spacey atmospherics, and “Teeny Says” delivers a 70-second shot of melody and punk muscle.

There’s no single story tying the record together, and that’s part of the point. The songs come from different places and different moments, but together they reflect the same songwriter who has always believed the material should decide where it goes.