B-Side Guys

Geographical dislocation often generates unique creative perspectives. On “Disappear,” Old Fashioned Bleeding Hearts—the Brooklyn-based project of songwriter Colton Tracy—examines how time and distance transform not just surroundings but perception itself, creating a sonic landscape where Montana vastness meets urban claustrophobia.

The track establishes its philosophical terrain immediately, opening with the line “Get around the sight and the sound / It’s all going down / And nothing to keep it in.” This initial image of sensory containment breaking down sets the stage for what becomes an extended meditation on memory’s unreliability. The production brilliantly reinforces this theme—guitar tones simultaneously sharp and hazy create textural contradictions that mirror the lyrical exploration of certainty dissolving into doubt.

What distinguishes “Disappear” from standard indie rock introspection is its refusal to romanticize either past or present. When Tracy sings “Looking back to see where you were / You’re not even sure / The way you remember it,” he acknowledges memory’s malleability without nostalgia’s comforting filter. This unflinching approach manifests musically through arrangements that balance garage rock immediacy with moments of unsettling ambient space, creating temporal disorientation that enhances the thematic content.

The track’s central paradox emerges in the observation that increased knowledge creates dissolution rather than clarity: “Run along for all that you know / The further you go / The more you will see come out / and start to fade away.” This counterintuitive relationship between discovery and disappearance creates emotional tension that drives the composition forward, particularly as the chorus-like refrain repeatedly returns to the phrase “softly disappear”—suggesting gradual rather than sudden erasure.

Tracy’s 15 years in Brooklyn clearly inform the track’s urban anxiety, particularly in lines like “Take away the light of the day / You’re into the gray / You’re head going everywhere.” Yet Montana’s influence manifests in the song’s preoccupation with elemental imagery—air, stone, light—creating a grounding counterpoint to metropolitan disorientation. This synthesis of rural expansiveness and urban confinement yields a distinctive sonic identity where garage rock’s raw edges meet alternative rock’s atmospheric depth.

The track’s most affecting section arrives with “Buried in the deep and the dark / The cold and the stark / A cave for the delicate.” Here, fragility finds protection through concealment rather than exposure, suggesting complex emotional survival strategies. When Tracy advises to “Do your best to leave them alone / And under the stone / Secure so they don’t break out,” the instrumentation creates tension between protection and imprisonment—guitar and bass lines intertwining to suggest both embrace and constraint.

As first single from a forthcoming three-song EP, “Disappear” establishes Old Fashioned Bleeding Hearts as a project capable of transforming geographical and temporal displacement into universal emotional exploration. By examining how memory and identity dissolve across time and place, Tracy has created something that feels simultaneously deeply personal and broadly resonant—a disappearing act that paradoxically leaves lasting impression.