Morning Bear - “Reap and Sow”

Photo by Meesh Deyden

Denver, Colorado-based singer-songwriter John Runnels, aka Morning Bear, is back with his warm and nostalgic brand of folk music, offering the world “Reap and Sow.”

If you have ever read a single page of our blog, you’ll know that we are drawn to music that reaches deeply into our souls, igniting the fires of introspection– this is exactly what one should expect when pressing play on “Reap and Sow.” What we now assume to be one of Runnels’ signatures, the track gently fades in, saturating the sonic space with the pleasant, ethereal sounds of a distant organ. From there, the tender and percussive strums of an acoustic guitar breathe life into the arrangement.

A few keys from a piano melodically dance across the production, providing a melancholic ambience to the track before Runnels begins his heavenly vocal delivery. And once he starts to sing, it will be blatantly obvious as to why we’ve written these paragraphs. His voice is everything we’ve come to know and love about the genre of indie folk, offering a raw, stripped-back honesty– the kind of sound that reminds us why we began the blog in the first place.

The remarkable falsetto on the refrain is coupled with the sounds of angelic backing vocals, resulting in a mesmerizing paragon of music, akin to the work of Bon Iver and Novo Amor, forever two of our favorites. If Runnels keeps releasing music this emotionally compelling, it will only be a matter of time before we’re all Shazaming his work as it appears in episodes of any highly revered television series.

-HD