It’s taken six years for T.Gold (Saman Khoujinian and Gabriel Anderson) to produce their second album, which was released last Friday and is called “Life is a Wonder and It’s Cruel“. The album was inspired by reading, or at least partially reading, Antonio Gramsci’s “Prison Letters”. You’d have thought six years would have been long enough, but as T.Gold explain, they got enough from a partial perusal: “We recently came across an idea from the late Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci from his 1929 Prison Letters. To be honest, we barely read any of the book, so we don’t really know his intention behind it, but, lightly paraphrased, the idea is “pessimism of the intellect entangled with optimism of the will.” This hit us like a freaking tidal wave, and it beautifully encapsulates the broader throughline of this record.”
Which is interesting, considering that today’s song is a remake of Peggy Seeger’s version of the traditional song, recorded simply with just Khoujinian and Anderson in a quiet room. The performance is shaped by close listening—vocal pauses, shared breath, and micro-beats of percussion guiding the song’s emotional pull.
And – what’s the T.Gold story? Well, Saman Khoujinian and Gabriel Anderson met in high school in Miami, both moved to Carrboro in 2011, and are now well-known in North Carolina’s independent music scene for their frequent collaborations. For the new album, they brought in numerous collaborators for a wider folktronica-indie-folk sound, but, as noted, not on this song.
