About Last of the Wixteds
Donagh and Burnelle
Hey hey — we’re so glad you made it.
Last of the Wixteds is the songwriting and production project of Donagh and Burnelle Gleason, two singer-songwriters making music from our home studio in Nashville.
This is a DIY indie project in the truest sense: written, recorded, produced, and engineered by us, with help from trusted friends, live players, and the occasional rogue cellist.
We originally met on a film set in New York City, spent years writing, playing, and testing songs in small rooms and old venues, and eventually carried that creative thread to Nashville.
The songs live somewhere between modern heartland rock, roots rock, alternative, a touch of cinema, and whatever happens when two people keep showing up for it.
Thanks for being here.
“All of us contain Music and Truth, but most of us can't get it out.” - Mark Twain
...
Nobody wanted the apartment at the time, for superstitious reasons. We had the top level of a 3 story home looking directly into the graveyard. All kinds of birds and wildlife lived over the graveyard wall. We would laugh when we would hear and then see a gang of turkeys roaming the headstones, imagining them in their little leather jackets.
There were ghosts. Computers that would turn on and play music. Cold spots you would walk through and brush off…‘must be poor insulation in just that wall.’ A busy and loud road whose sounds would magically disappear over the stone wall where we took long walks.
They filed their dead like a library - by category.
"Whose grave you lookin' for? Oh, he’s in the jazz section."
...
"Whose grave you lookin' for?
Oh, he's in the jazz section"
...So we found W C Handy and put our bluesiest jackets and hats and faces on, and took the photo. We really dug it. I had just started writing music again, and was obsessed. Donagh had been writing for years.
We were afraid when we moved away we wouldn’t be able to write anything else. Because as you write, you start to recognize an otherworldly feeling or connection from wherever the music and lyrics might be flowing. Do the ghosts stay in the Bronx? Will they come with us? You move into an apartment like that, laughing at the superstitious for not taking such a great deal, and ultimately move out superstitious yourself.
It's quieter here in Nashville but plenty of ghosts everywhere. They come and they go, but they always find us. And we welcome those co-writes.
