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Aug 04, 2021 By Caleb Campbell Photography by @eatthecakenyc

NYC singer/songwriter Grant Swift is sharing his debut full-length solo album First Elephant later this week. Previously Swift has performed as one half of the acoustic duo Mac/Glidden, debuting in 2017 with a psychedelic folk rock effort, Fall Into The Dark. Last year Swift embarked upon his own solo career with his 2 song release, Fear and Love in the Time of Corona, written while he was recovering from COVID-19.

Now he’s back with his debut full-length solo album, weaving together strands of pop melody with an inward search for meaning and purpose. The full record releases August 6th but you can get an early listen to First Elephant below, premiering with Under the Radar.

First Elephant marries the disparate musical threads Swift has followed thus far with a newfound penchant for irresistible pop hooks. Whether on the loping acoustics and string-backed falsetto of the opener, “I Just Can’t Honestly,” or on the driving spoken word power pop of “I’m The Man,” Swift displays a deft hold on potent pop melody. More subdued moments, like the symphonic beauty of “I’m Looking Through You,” are bolstered by sharp instrumental arrangements, but Swift equally lets loose with tastes of upbeat jangling folk rock like “Sunshine” or “What I’m Thinking.”

Yet, despite the sharp pop sensibilities, Swift’s writing also offers layers of meaning. As he explains, “The songs on this album lean in more of a pop direction than I usually go, but philosophically the material is very familiar to me. The album as a whole deals with existential crisis and a search for meaning. Sometimes that’s as banal as “FOMO,” and sometimes it’s just a stressful work day, but the itch at the core of those feelings is a universal thing and one humans have been struggling with since the beginning. The desire for belonging, to have purpose, to avoid harm, to be loved… These things were strongly on my mind while I was writing the songs, and I think they translate well into the pop idiom on this album.”

He continues, explaining of the title, “The title of the album, First Elephant, refers to the parable of the Blind Men And An Elephant, in which a group of blind men, encountering an elephant for the first time, try to describe what it is like while each only observing distinct parts of the elephant. They experience and describe the elephant in vastly different ways. Each of them is partly right, but all of them are wrong. In some versions of the parable, they resort to violence against each other over their conflicting accounts.

Check out the full record below, out everywhere on August 6th.