On Brokedown Palace, Kevin Farge sings about cars on fire, wildfires in California, and businesses struggling to keep on the lights.

Kevin wrote the songs for Brokedown Palace before the pandemic hit, but the cracks were already there. In 2018, Kevin moved to the small Costa Rican beach town he had been visiting since he was a kid. "My step-mom is from this town. I wanted to have time to surf and sing my songs," he says. In the countryside, Kevin entered a sort of early quarantine and wrote the songs that would comprise Brokedown Palace.

The songs sound like melodic folk music. "She Went to Denton", a duet with Lily Moore, finds Kevin and Lily singing the contrast between two characters in the small Texas college town of the same name. "Me and Marty", a song ostensibly about going to check the surf, showcases a raw interchange between Kevin's American primitive guitar playing and producer John Britton's jazz-oriented piano playing. Here, Kevin sings about the joy of being close to the power of an ocean wave, the flight mechanics of birds, and watching open ocean swells march in from the horizon. It kind of makes you wonder what The Beach Boys music would have sounded like if Brian Wilson had surfed. Kevin cites Brian Wilson as a major influence, as well as Nick Drake, Donovan, Cat Stevens, Kings of Convenience, and Devendra Banhart. The result sounds a bit like Paul Simon or Neil Young.

Brokedown Palace is not a celebration of the brokenness of the system, the individual, or the environment. But its songs recognize that a system can break down and a person can feel broken in it. It claims a space in the brokenness in order to move forward. "I want to go with you to the rough places and stay with you through them," Kevin says. Kevin points to the beauty of the human spirit, nature, and our collective endeavor on Brokedown Palace.