Life Through Loss Garreth Broke

• Garreth Broke: Just Another Day (Without You):
• 1 Broke: Just Another Day (Without You) 02:20
• What We Shared (Playing Amelie):
• 2 Broke: What We Shared (Playing Amelie) 01:26
• Concrete Bunks:
• 3 Broke: Concrete Bunks 03:27
• Never Enough Time:
• 4 Broke: Never Enough Time 02:13
• Beautiful Ache:
• 5 Broke: Beautiful Ache 02:17
• Mourn:
• 6 Broke: Mourn 02:08
• The Big Wave:
• 7 Broke: The Big Wave 02:20
• Lifted:
• 8 Broke: Lifted 02:56
• (Don't) Change:
• 9 Broke: (Don't) Change 01:47
• What Matters:
• 10 Broke: What Matters 02:48
• Bittersweet:
• 11 Broke: Bittersweet 02:53
• Photograph:
• 12 Broke: Photograph 02:30
• You're in Everything I Do:
• 13 Broke: You're in Everything I Do 03:27
• Life Finds a Way:
• 14 Broke: Life Finds a Way 04:38
• Total Runtime 37:10

Info for Life Through Loss

"Life Through Loss is an album for anyone who has experienced grief, composed and performed by a musician with a deep insight into the grieving process.

For the last few years, Garreth Brooke has been volunteering as a ‘Trauerbegleiter’. These ‘grief companions’ sit with people who are grieving and help them to explore the complex of emotions they are experiencing. It’s not therapy, just companionship, but it gives a profound glimpse into how people cope with loss.

Grief doesn’t end, it just changes. People learn to live with it. The intense emotions of the first days often die down over the course of the next weeks and months, but can rise up at unexpected moments. This can be hard to manage, especially in a society where grief has become strangely taboo.

This is an album about how to live through loss. It’s partly a personal reflection on the composer’s own evolving grief for his suicidal mother, including his early guilt at failing to “save” her and his struggle to figure out how to feel about someone who died through suicide. It’s also a distillation of the many conversations that he has shared with other people who are already grieving or fear bereavement.

Buried at the core of all these conversations, beneath the sadness, is love. There’s no grief without love." (Garreth Brooke)

Garreth Broke, piano

Recording engineering by Tom Blankenberg
Recorded on a Steinway Model D at Van Heys Studios
Mixing and mastering by Kai Blankenberg of Skyline Tonfabrik

Garreth Brooke
is a graduate pedagogue and a composer based in Frankfurt, Germany.

Although his years of musical training were fairly classical, from beginning to learn the piano at 6, until obtaining his university degrees (which included work on representations of sexuality in the operas of Benjamin Britten), his life path is more atypical. Indeed, he has to his credit several experiences in the charitable world in particular as a volunteer on organic farms, a student in environmental conservation and a worker for a youth hostel association during 4 years. These gave him more discernment, perspective and depth at an age when one is typically still wondering about one’s own future.

These days his time is divided between musical composition, his work as a teacher and the charity project “Upright”, which publishes contemporary piano sheet music.

This album contains no booklet.