David Franklin Courtright has released new single, “in a garden of love,” (ft. Chrome Sparks). The track is off Courtright’s forthcoming LP Brutal Tenderness available August 8th via TODO Records. “I wrote “in a garden of love” earlier than most of the other ones on the record, not long after “my first love,” and I feel they both share a dark, broody siblinghood that felt right to bookend the record right before the final dénouement,” Courtright explains. “It was born out of something my former partner said about how love is a garden, and it must be tended to otherwise it dies or becomes overgrown. I had this shoving feeling that our love was now in the dark forever, and how I felt that that garden we had built was slowly wilting as we let go of each other. Even a garden of love can wilt in the dark,’ is me sort of saying even a great love takes a lot of work, a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluids, and even still the sun can go down on it.” “in a garden of love” follows previous singles “boy” and “feels” (ft. Julianna Barwick).

Brutal Tenderness, taken from a line in Frank O’Hara’s poem “River,” is the debut album of David Franklin Courtright. It is a work about radical tenderness and joy in the face of sadness, loss, and fear. Written and recorded over a span of eight years and three continents, the work seeks to explore the seemingly opposing forces (or bipolarity) of brutality and tenderness, to guide the listener through a deep-hearted journey of love and grief, of fractures and healing. It is a kaleidoscope of emotional and kinetic soundscapes.

Brutal Tenderness is a process of reckoning with a life as a queer boy who couldn’t pass and was never allowed to hide, of setting free that gleefully expressive cartwheeling child who was put into hiding, locked beneath a veneer of false masculinity, and entombed in a character to avoid persecution. It is a triumphant and harrowing reclamation.

The new record is a love poem to that child-self, and to the person today who can exist in these realms of sadness without the compulsion to run from them or bury or hide them from the world, and in that patient practice, can touch and inhabit and know those sadnesses while being able to also know and touch and inhabit joy, and love, and inner peace.

David Franklin Courtright 2025 Tour Dates

8/2 – Los Angeles, CA – St. Athanasius Chapel
8/8 – New York, NY – Union Pool
8/14 – Atlanta, GA – Commune

Order “In A Garden of Love” by David Franklin Courtright (ft. Chrome Sparks)