Michael Cormier-O’Leary is a master of the type of folky, gently experimental Americana that unfolds slowly and lingers long in the memory. His voice, a country croon that sweeps upward into an unfettered falsetto, is perfectly suited to his songs, which often feel rangy and exploratory yet always seem anchored in personal experience. His 2019 LP Days Like Pearls was a series of meditations on childhood that recalled early Iron and Wine or a hazier Sufjan Stevens, while its sister record M-F chronicled a contemporary relationship. This impressive dual release marked Cormier-O’Leary out as a songwriter of real talent, and subsequent albums, More Light!! (2021) and Anything Can Be Left Behind (2023), cemented that status.
But it’s not just as a songwriter that he excels. He considers himself primarily an instrumentalist, and his day job sees him behind the drumkit in much-loved Philly indie mainstays Friendship. He also writes, composes and plays in experimental supergroup Hour. It’s worth remembering his varied roles when you come to listen to Proof Enough, a six-song EP that began life in Cormier-O’Leary’s basement in 2022, because at the outset, this seems like a fairly straightforward singer-songwriter release, but closer listens reveal hidden depths and unexpected directions. Del is a light country shuffle, a loping rhythm backing up a melancholy melody, but small doorways to other musical dimensions open up briefly: there are Heeyoon Won’s harmonies, giving the whole thing a softened, dreamy edge, and Cormier-O’Leary’s evident love for ambient and neo-classical music filters through in the form of impressionistic dashes of colour, chamber-pop dynamics and extended cymbal splashes.
And then there is Cormier-O’Leary’s lyrical gift: he dwells on the smallest and most apparently mundane details until they become meaningful, and then disarms you with a switch to a higher mode, a tactic particularly evident on Gouache, where routine activities accrue slowly like layers of dust, inexorably becoming part of the fabric of lived experience. Piano and acoustic guitar advance together, in and out of step, a slow dance through the years. The EP dwells on familial connections and intergenerational differences and the passage of time – and its corollary, nostalgia – is an important preoccupation. The softly-plucked strings of lead track Marilyn lead you into a false sense of security: unexpected melodic choices and layers of vocals mirror the naivety of childhood, the song’s theme.
Sky Is Blue’s rhythmic simplicity becomes meditative over its five soft-focus minutes, though the occasional unconventional chord change precludes any possible allegation of repetitiveness. The song is a refreshingly conversational but nonetheless serious exploration of death and feelings of loss. Staring has a sunnier aspect: the harmonies and drum fills glow with an inner light, like some lost Laurel Canyon classic. Jackson Browne at his most stripped-back is one possible reference point.
Best of all is the closing song, Pressed Flowers, a meditation on memory and loss, a tender love song about the impossibility of holding on to the past and the inevitability of trying. The tune is lullaby-simple, the lyrics acutely personal but somehow universal. Cormier-O’Leary wrote the song a year after his wedding, and like the rest of the EP, it is suffused with the sense of passing time, of fleeting memories and eerie returns to the past. In many ways, it is almost Proustian. But these six songs go beyond nostalgic effect: there is a recognition of the future as well as the past here. Cormier-O’Leary became a father while recording Proof Enough, and his writing is full of hopes and fears and the quiet determination to live well. He has become an exceptional songwriter, alchemising human concerns into a kind of low-key poetry and backing it all up with a nuanced and delightfully off-kilter grasp of song dynamics.
Proof Enought (February 25, 2026) Dear Life
Bandcamp: https://michaelcormier.bandcamp.com/album/proof-enough