Chris Senseney and Stefanie Drootin-Senseney make albums as Big Harp tha feels like explorations of characters that we just barely get to see, but all of which seem fully formed. They are rich and they are maladjusted. They are deep and they are genuine. They are everything that we understand about ourselves. We are -- none of us -- normal. They are havens for these wondrous tales of men doubled down on their eccentric natures, on the various ways that we're all made to feel and look foolish and yet, the trick is always to keep going, to pretend as if there's glory in that, to know that we're stuck with no other choice but rather to own our issues and all of the weirdness that finds or found us. It's usually never even all that strange, just different. The people that Senseney writes into existence are those who mull, those who wallow and those who find that they're able to locate what happiness has been allotted for them in the oddest places, if they find it at all.
*Essay originally published June, 2013