David Franklin Courtright Album Release Show

Join us for the David Franklin Courtright Brutal Tenderness Album Release Show and Benefit at St. Athanasius Episcopal Church at St. Paul's Commons in Echo Park August 2 at 6:30pm for a night of live music and celebration.

In addition to an album release show, this will be a benefit show to raise money for the St. James-in-the-City Soup Kitchen, of which David is a volunteer. Select the "Patron +" ticket option to pay what you desire beyond the suggested ticket price. A portion of the proceeds after expeses will go directly to Soup Kitchen.

About St. James-in-the-City Soup Kitchen

At the St. James-in-the-City Episcopal Church Soup Kitchen, our 100% volunteer staff serves approximately 100 unhoused and low income neighbors at three weekly Soup Kitchens. The main demographic of those we serve consists of chronically unhoused neighbors. We see more young people and families with children as our capacity to serve increases. We know through our conversations with our guests that many people we serve have been chronically unhoused for a long time, over years. We believe by observation that the majority of people we serve are struggling with mental health and/or substance use disorders.

Yes, we provide delicious, nutritious meals at all our events. By way of keeping our budget low and respecting the environment, we work primarily with rescued produce. Meals consist of locally prepared dishes including soups, stews, pasta, salads, fresh fruits and vegetables, sandwiches, and beverages.

But our real goal is to nourish people in spirit as well as in body, to provide safe space for socializing, to promote dignity and respect. Access to our events is low barrier. We do not take names, or require identification or income verification, nor do we ask where people stay. We provide a charging station, donated clothing, board games, an art table, musical instruments, and a lending library. We host vaccine clinics bi-weekly in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Health Department. A team of volunteer doctors joins us monthly to provide basic screening, primary care, and referral to nearby clinics.

We intend to support our neighbors on their journeys towards a more secure and healthy life, in whatever ways make best sense to them. Your financial donation in any amount—from $6 to $6gazillion—makes it possible to keep on keeping on.

What does your donation money do?

• $6 pays for two meals
• $100 pays for 33 meals
• $400 pays for a month’s worth of fresh OJ/Apple juice/milk for SK
• $500 pays for new underwear for 100 unhoused guests
• $900 pays for our only paid employees: kind and thoughtful security guards for a month
• $1000 pays for deep cleaning services after every Soup Kitchen for one month.
• $1,500 pays for a week’s worth of meals at all three weekly SKs

"I found St. James in the early autumn of 2021, soon after losing a dear friend to a fentanyl overdose. It was only a year and a half into Covid, and I found an immediate home in St. James, so familiar from a childhood spent in the church in Atlanta. Soup Kitchen became a place of joy and service for me; I've made such beautiful friends and lately have been playing piano for our guests while they eat, which has been a deeply rewarding way to serve our community (and a great opportunity to practice)! It only made sense to bring SK into this show, as a way to spread the word about our mission and also to include that part of my life into this joyful and expressive part of me. I hope you'll join me and supporting the Soup Kitchen at St. James!"

—David Franklin Courtright

About David Franklin Courtright

David Franklin Courtright is an LA-based singer, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, and baker. Born in North Carolina and raised in Atlanta, David absorbed the eclectic range of musical influences the South had to offer, from Appalachian folk to Classic Rock to Southern hip-hop.

As a child, David, who went by Davey, had a deep and mystical connection with the natural world and God. Raised in the Episcopal Church in Atlanta, David grew up knowing a version of Christianity that included queer people, and the head rector at the church (and David’s spiritual mentor) was openly gay. During this formative time in his life, he found that the queerest environment in his life was actually the church. A deeply sensitive and effeminate child, Davey, like many frilly young boys, grew up to learn to hide behind a shield of masculinity to survive. In many ways, his music is a continual dearmoring, a way of taking each layer of that scar tissue away and allowing himself to become even more vulnerable to the world. This is where he began to see how “brutal” and “tenderness” entwine.

In 2009, David began writing and recording under the moniker Suno Deko, which was the name he attached to early demos while living in New Delhi, India. For this release, David is stepping away from that project and releasing Brutal Tenderness under his given name. The reasons for this are many, but the main impetus was a desire to reach new levels of vulnerability and authenticity in his work—to be as sincere as possible. To do that he felt that a nom de plume stood in the way of that desire for connection and expression. In his striving for greater intimacy in the work, with the listeners and in the world, he felt it necessary that it come directly from him, no filter.

While making music under Suno Deko, David had the chance to tour Europe with Wye Oak and Angel Olsen (who sings on the record), and has toured and played shows with Hundred Waters, Mitski, Moses Sumney, How to Dress Well, and Julianna Barwick. In 2014, he played the inaugural FORM: Arcosanti festival in Arizona. He has collaborated with Alex Somers, Chrome Sparks, Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters), and more. He plays guitar and piano and sings. He wrote, performed, produced, engineered, and mixed the album (with some help from good friends).

Brutal Tenderness will be released on the brand-new TODO Music label, which is helmed by Simon Halliday of 4AD and Warp. This album represents a radical transformation that has spanned the near decade of making it. The record has carried David through the pandemic, through breakups with lovers and friends, through a psychiatric hospitalization and bipolar diagnosis, through his travels in Italy, Thailand, France, England, and his time living in New York City and Los Angeles. It was a companion, a place where all the complex and difficult feelings could live and become beautiful. It saw him through two major depressive episodes and their recovery.

David sincerely hopes that his music can be a place of healing, a place to explore and visit the sorrows and wonderment of love, and the shape of one’s journey through both the divine and the hellish. He seeks dynamic emotional expression and as a poet believes that the lyrics are the true magic of any song. In fact, the song titles of Brutal Tenderness are a standalone poem by design.

In addition to being a musician and singer/songwriter, David is a poet, writer, and baker, and is currently working on a historical fiction novel about his queer great uncle who was a hairdresser and served in WWII, and a book of poems written in the wake of his father’s death in December of 2024.

David is planning three release shows—one in Los Angeles at the St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, New York City at Union Pool (8.7), and Atlanta at Commune (8.14).

About Brutal Tenderness

Brutal Tenderness, taken from a line in Frank O’Hara’s poem, “River,” is the debut album of David Franklin Courtright. Brutal Tenderness is a ten-track album, and it is also a poem—the track listing is itself a standalone poem. It is a work about radical tenderness and joy in the face of sadness, loss, and fear. Written and recorded over a span of eight years and three continents, the work seeks to explore the seemingly opposing forces (or bipolarity) of brutality and tenderness, to guide the listener through a deep-hearted journey of love and grief, of fractures and healing. It is a kaleidoscope of emotional and kinetic soundscapes.

This album is a process of reckoning with a life as a queer boy who couldn’t pass and was never allowed to hide, of setting free that gleefully expressive cartwheeling child who was put into hiding, locked beneath a veneer of false masculinity, and entombed in a character i created as ‘myself’ to avoid persecution. It is a triumphant and harrowing reclamation.

Brutal Tenderness is a love poem to that child-self, and to the person today who can exist in these realms of sadness without the compulsion to run from them or bury or hide them from the world, and in that patient practice, can touch and inhabit and know those sadnesses while being able to also know and touch and inhabit joy, and love, and inner peace.

Brutal Tenderness is also the child of the loss of a first love, one of life’s great rites of passage, and the birth of a love for myself I could never have reached without being utterly lost in life’s wildernesses. It is brutal and it is tender, as life without fail always is.

Brutal Tenderness is both a poem and an interconnected body of musical works.

Brutal Tenderness is falling through all of love’s dark and light landscapes, inhabiting the hurting self and knowing the shape of its rivers.

Brutal Tenderness is a cascade, a masquerade, a purpling landscape dotting with stars, a shriek-white moon wombed in a longing rising like bats in the sky.

Brutal Tenderness is a plum, a womb, a power.

Brutal Tenderness is a plume, a wound, a tower.

And at its very heart, Brutal Tenderness is a love poem.

Be tender always.

xo David