**Lost and Found—A Personal Journey with Logan Brill’s “Shuteye” (2015)**
I remember the first time I caught wind of Logan Brill’s “Shuteye”—it was in a Nashville dive, rain pounding the windows, drunken laughter waltzing over broken pool cues. Someone pushed an old jukebox button and Brill’s voice cut through the din, not with the twangy bravado or radio-polished theatrics of Nashville’s chart-toppers, but with a sort of reckless vulnerability that immediately made me put down my glass and just listen. I looked her up that night and found a 2015 country album that had slipped, quietly, into existence: “Shuteye.” Even in today’s algorithmically curated world, Brill’s “Shuteye” remains criminally underappreciated—a gem hiding in the rough, for wanderers and worriers alike.
It begins with “World Still Round,” a song that hooked me like only the best kind of heartache can. Brill croons, “Everybody’s running / Chasing after something / But the world is still round…” Those words exposed the ceaseless wheel of my own anxiety—anxieties about lost love, lost youth, lost time. I was a compulsive ruminator in those days, spinning in circles after a failed marriage and a soulless corporate job that barely kept me on my feet. There I was in my little apartment at midnight, drinking coffee because sleep felt like betrayal, and Logan Brill twined through my headphones, offering not pity but permission—to ache, yes, but also to recognize continuity in spite of pain.
The album’s title track, “Shuteye,” feels almost like a lullaby for insomniacs—gentle, yearning, but with a backbone. She paints longing and exhaustion with a raw grace:
*”I count the shadows crawling on the wall / Made friends with the ceiling, and I tell it all / Pray for a little shuteye tonight…”*
It’s a simple lyric, almost offhanded in its intimacy. Yet, maybe that’s what makes it so powerful: the acknowledgement of how, sometimes, solace comes not from grand gestures, but from the habit of survival—tracing cracks in the ceiling at 3 a.m. while hoping for a dreamless hour. By the time this song reached its third chorus, I was crying, not out of sadness (or not only), but recognition. I knew those shadows and ceiling conversations all too well.
Brill’s southern roots run deep throughout “Shuteye,” and it’s a testament to her songwriting that she doesn’t lean on the easy crutches of genre or cliché. Instead, she gets personal and, in doing so, lets us do the same. “Don’t Pick It Up” is a gentle warning to herself, to all of us compulsive rehashers, about picking at old wounds:
*”Don’t pick it up, let it lay / All the pieces that you broke today / Sometimes what you lose, you gotta leave behind…”*
For someone like me—the perpetual overthinker, sifting through psychic wreckage for lessons I never manage to apply—this song lands like tough love wrapped in honey. I played it on repeat one particularly rough December evening, after lapsing (again) into the loneliness that comes with self-imposed exile from friends and family out of shame. There’s healing here, but not the easy kind—it’s the kind you earn by refusing, finally, to tear at what’s trying to scar over.
But “Shuteye” is not all shadow and sorrow. There are windows flung open, streaks of sunlight eking through. On “Walk of Shame,” Brill gives reckless romance its due—less Taylor Swift’s confessional pretty and more Lucinda Williams’ unapologetic swagger. She sings,
*”Don’t need your judgement, don’t need your name / Just let me walk, let me walk / My walk of shame…”*
There’s a playful freedom in this song, a permission to be flawed, to mess up and laugh about it without inviting the jury of your own conscience. I played this song on summer road trips, windows down, sunburnt thigh stuck to fake leather. It was liberating, if only for three minutes and twelve seconds.
There’s another track that floored me the first time I listened to it in the drowsy haze between two panic attacks: “Where Rainbows Never Die,” a tender cover of a SteelDrivers classic. In her hands, the song is both prayer and elegy—a wish for rest at the end of it all. Brill’s voice, smoky and cracked, tinged with both defeat and hope, suits the lyric’s promise of “forever young in a place where rainbows never die.” That line struck a nerve. Even as a child I was obsessed with the illusion of permanence—now, middle-aged and raw, it’s the idea of peace after all the running that keeps me afloat.
What sets “Shuteye” apart from the superficial hellos and goodbyes of modern country radio is its emotional honesty. The production is stripped but never sparse, allowing her lyrics to bleed and shimmer. There’s mandolin and dobro, a little backbeat, but never a moment where you doubt that these are Brill’s truths. I think about how lonely this kind of bravery can feel—singing into oblivion, hoping that just one soul out there might recognize themselves in your struggles.
And here’s the psychoanalytical core: Listening to “Shuteye” reminded me that I am not my scars, or my insomnia, or my shameful decisions. Brill’s music creates space for contradiction—to be hurt and healing, lonely and loved, awake and yearning for sleep, all at once. I want to think that anyone who’s ever walked into midnight with heavy feet and heavier thoughts will find a companion in this album.
Yet, no great album is flawless, and “Shuteye” falters in its scope. Sometimes, the gentleness of Brill’s delivery can blur the edges—certain tracks, like “Far Cry,” could use a little more grit, a rawness that would elevate the narrative past mere melancholy. The album, at times, feels so intent on comfort that it risks sedation; a touch more anger or unfiltered ache might have made the catharsis even sharper.
Still, these are quibbles in the face of such generosity. “Shuteye” is the midnight text you didn’t know you needed, a call from a friend you thought you lost. For me, it’s the soundtrack to a season spent learning how to let go: of sleep, of past mistakes, of the fantasy that healing is ever complete.
As Logan sings in the closing bars, “It’s all right if you can’t sleep tonight.”
Neither can I, Logan. But with your songs in the room, at least I know I’m not alone.
—Kroes den Bock