Some days simply swamp us. Gabriel Bruce can't help himself. He just loves the depths. He loves being submerged in the deepest parts of these swamps, with the sticky, muddy floors, with no clear way out. When he feels the pit in his stomach, he knows that he's full. It's then when he's sure that he's where he belongs. He wouldn't know what to do with clear skies. They don't interest him.
He'd prefer the storms and the hung heads. When he sings about feeling like he's he might be dead, this isn't a cry for help, but more of a tingling that lets him know that he's where he should be. For this singer and songwriter, feeling anything else would be awkward. He takes us into these dark and enigmatic places, where he and everyone else are fairly distraught, but it serves as a normal that can be handled. It's human and astonishingly beautiful in its melodrama, which recalls Tom Waits or Johnny Cash, with the Rick Rubin recordings that he made toward the end of his life.
"All That I Have" is a rambling some of complicated sorrow that is a perfect snapshot of Bruce, when he sings, "I could take the pain, but the pleasure was worse/When I asked for an ambulance you called me a hurse/What's a little death in the scheme of survival/I know that it's true cause I read in the Bible/That it's all that I have left of you/Some blood on the tissue you left in my room/And I don't know why I didn't say goodbye, but I had to leave/You wanted nothing, but you ask for too much and you drowned out my voice with your asking/Now the hourglass is broken and the ribbon is bowed and the moment we feel just passes/And I think of you now, all beauty and shame/And I want for your body and I curse for your name." It will be dark for a while. He's not coming out of this.