Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks
Heartsick

The old and smoky bar had long since shed its gleaming attire of a trendy venue, and had remained almost exclusively frequented by some locals and a few travelers passing by from time to time... In the end, they didn't even consume: they would peek in for a moment, look around, but then quickly leave timidly, almost repelled by the environment reluctant to welcome them. The lights were often dim: the owner wanted to save on the bill, and in the end, the half-darkness was conducive to the patrons' drunkenness. The air smelled between the stench of smoke and that of the cheap alcohol being served, the furniture was very sparse, but there was one thing that was never missing, the music. An old grand piano was placed in a corner of the room: on top of it was always present, day and night, a glass, a bottle of whiskey, a candelabrum. The pianist was a spectral type, who suited the environment well: tall, thin, a long coat that seemed to have been stolen from some deceased person as worn and outdated as it was, long hair over his shoulders and a top hat on his head. The good Wyatt had a habit: for every customer who entered the venue he improvised a piece on his piano. He only needed a glance: a minute of silence, he stared them down for a few seconds, and immediately started with his tune, which in his mind exactly reflected what he believed was the story of that character. And usually, they were never beautiful stories because hardly anyone entering the venue was seeking happiness, but only comfort and consolation from their problems and past, which they tried to drown in a bottle of alcohol. Some customers were then "affectionate," so over time Wyatt had had the chance to write real soundtracks dedicated to their entrance.
There was the widower, who had attempted suicide more than once without ever succeeding: in his eyes, the pianist saw only ghosts of the past and a desire to end it, never fulfilled due to a mix of misfortune and cowardice. There was the young man abandoned by the love of his life: after being left he no longer had the strength to recover, so he wandered aimlessly through the venue, flinching at every voice louder than a whisper, his gaze lost in some smoky memory. His counterpart was the bride left at the altar: strange that the two had never tried to get to know each other, united as they were by the same unfortunate fate. She too, like him, was clouded by the memory of a moment of joy that never materialized, and, perhaps because of a latent madness slowly emerging from the depths of her being, loved going around with the white (indeed, now gray) veil on her head. Then there was the murderess: no one knew, but Wyatt had seen it all in that woman's eyes. She was a mother, devastated by her impotence in the face of her daughters' illness, who had one day decided to kill them by suffocating them in their sleep: she told the police they had died from the disease, and the officers believed her (or perhaps didn't care that much, after all, she was just a poor woman). The woman always had tears in her eyes, moved jerkily like a mannequin, was skeletal thin, her body reflecting the emptiness in her heart.
At the end of the evening when everyone had left and the bar closed, Wyatt would take the last sip of whiskey before climbing the stairs at the back of the bar and retiring to his room (his lodging was indeed on the upper floor of the venue, a cubbyhole that a normal person would have no difficulty defining as a broom closet).
Once he set down his hat, he would lie on the bed, and before falling asleep, he would usually sing the song he dedicated himself to his life, his past, his sadness, and his ghosts: "It seemed to me that summer It would never come again/I watched the snow through dusty windowpanes/Every time I dreamed at night I woke up filled with terror/Silent things were floating in the air/And I wonder how you sleep/And I wonder how you breathe".
Lonesome Wyatt is an American singer-songwriter with two projects, Those Poor Bastards and Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks, and the current "Heartsick" is part of this latter. With the Holy Spooks Wyatt explores the more intimate, melancholic, and "gloomy" aspects showcased by TPH, removing the more rickety and dissonant parts and reducing it all to a dark and melancholic American country. To give you an idea, you can imagine a union between the grotesque “marches” often used by Danny Elfman for scoring Tim Burton's films and the dusty, dark, somber, and decadent atmospheres of the early Black Heart Procession. His are stories of melancholy, murderers, death that draw much inspiration in atmospheres from early 20th-century black and white horror films; his pieces are often singsong, but they can perfectly immerse the listener in the described setting. Musically, his gothic-like country is largely based on piano, guitar (or other string instruments like the ukulele), and various types of effects, including vocals (which often result intentionally filtered and distant, with a very “ghostly” rendering), the tracks are never long enough to bore and the listening is always very pleasant.
The production signed Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks is, in my opinion, very valid: true, conceptually it always revolves around very similar themes (and the author himself does not hide his fascination with the macabre atmospheres and dark stories he reprises in each of his albums), nonetheless it is always a pleasure to immerse in the music of the American singer-songwriter. Absolutely worth trying if you love Black Heart Procession and the dark mood that permeates the films (animated and not) of certain Tim Burton films.