Clash Music

Passenger

Rootless and full of regret

Passenger’s 23-year-old Brighton-based frontman Mike Rosenberg is a rare thing… a young man, with all the enthusiasm and innocence of any other, who is capable, through his lyrics, of telling stories from the perspective of the ageing, world-weary soul, lost, rootless and full of regret. His songwriting partner in this noble endeavor is Andrew Phillips, guitarist, arranger and soundtrack composer.

These two are the creative core of the excellent Passenger, and the ten songs that make up ‘Wicked Man’s Rest’, due to be released in September on the ChalkMark label, are an extraordinary mixture of acoustic folk in the storytelling tradition, and an epic-yet-intimate, electronica-influenced modernity, suffused with pain, sadness and precocious wisdom, yet completely free of defeatist miserablism.