Shane Bartell's voice – easy, impossibly infectious and thick with focus – can drift from vague and otherworldly to intimate and realized within a single breath, flitting effortlessly from throaty to smooth, mellow to scrappy, confident to crestfallen. Bartell's, "Too Soon To Say", takes you through the exhilaration, trials and tribulations of a budding relationship. Curiously well-suited to early morning (or face-on-the-floor brooding), it is the ideal soundtrack to post-bar comedowns: Bartell's voice blankets your most sensitive states. These are seamless sounds, the aural equivalents of deep-stomach butterflies, mystery and promise intertwined.

Shane Bartell grew up in the Texas Hill Country, surrounded by cowboy boots and snuff -- cultural references erased by his turning-point discovery of The Smiths and The Pixies. Moving to music-mecca Austin in the 90’s, he spent several years as the guitarist for the female-fronted band Cling and enjoyed sharing stages with the likes of Oasis and Liz Phair. Soon, Bartell decided to focus on songwriting, so he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he holed up with the famous Pacific Northwest rain as his backdrop. The results were magical. After a return returned to Austin in 2000, he quickly recruited a band and developed a famously loyal following that surprised club owners by singing along even before he had released a CD. The media took notice, and Bartell experienced lavish praise both on radio and in print. He then recorded "Too Soon To Say"with producer Lars Goransson (The Cardigans, Blondie).

Shane Bartell is concerned primarily with provocative, descriptive storytelling. A song cycle that loosely traces the rise and fall of an epic relationship – from its ponderous, eager origins through an excruciatingly anticlimactic end - "Too Soon To Say" details all the longing, nostalgia, regret, anger, and acceptance inevitably chained to meeting and then losing a lover. It’s a universal sequence, familiar and exhilarating – and, remarkably, just spinning "Too Soon to Say" is enough to make it all feel real again.