With his debut release, Continents Collide, Hilary Cousins is moving out from behind the scenes and into the light. Having worked in film and video production 
over the past ten years in a variety of capacities - including truck
driver, grip, production manager, and script-writer - Cousins has
participated in a wide range of projects from Indie films to documentaries,
industrials to high-profile Hollywood gigs. Throughout this time,
he also worked on his own original material - writing screenplays,
working
on short-films, and writing songs and poetry. But it was
while working on the set of countless music videos that he realized
what he really wanted to do was concentrate on writing and performing
his own music.
Continents Collide is an artistic achievement. This is passionate pop-rock, propelled by driving guitars, tight rhythms, compelling arrangements, and stirring lyrics. Co-produced by Tony Ungaro, whose credits include production work with Joe Jackson, Marshall Crenshaw, and Butch Vig, Continents Collide reveals Cousins as a writer of exceptional caliber.
Cousins' unconventional upbringing has informed his song writing. His father is an ex-Jesuit from New Orleans and a medieval historian, and his mother was a professor of English literature. Their home in rural Connecticut was a magnet for scholars, poets, nuns, carpenters, and gurus from around the globe. Traveling was an integral part of family-life: "My sisters and I were always being dragged to a site where some famous philosopher had lived, or where a saint had a vision and then spilled their blood in gratitude." Whether the heated discussions around the table concerned existentialism, altered states of consciousness, or the Dallas Cowboys, Cousins grew up in an atmosphere where the every-day and the more spectacular easily mingled.
Stylistically, Cousins' song writing represents a departure from the dominant aesthetic of irony and from the familiar "story-teller" approach. Convinced of the transformative power of word and music, his songs are stirring reflections in which the boundaries between the self and other, and between the beloved and the divine, become confused and intertwine. The song "Richest Man In the World" asks how a person can find meaning in a culture that praises conflicting measures of success. "Broken Man" conveys the burden of a man who is aware that he has been the cause of his own misfortunes. But even in the shadow of despair, these songs point toward hope, or at least to a connection with something larger. Cousins is especially intrigued with situations in which individual experience resonates with transcendence. In "If I Let You Down," we meet a narrator who is simultaneously grieving the death of a loved one and realizing that he and she continue to remain deeply connected. Some songs sound with joyous abandon and the delight of sensual pleasure. "Sound of Splashing Water" describes the intensity of passionate affair and the exhilaration and fear that surround the decision to give in to love. The drama in Cousins' songs comes from an acute awareness of love, grief, and isolation, and the struggle to understand an often incomprehensible world.
Continents Collide is an electrifying expression of Cousins' years spent exploring the way people, ideas, circumstances, and emotions converge - and sometimes collide.
