David Moore is gearing up to release his new album Graze The Bell, on January 30th through RVNG Intl. The record marks his first widely released solo piano album, following two decades of work with Bing & Ruth and collaborations with artists like Steve Gunn and Cowboy Sadness. Stripped back to piano alone, Graze The Bell is Moore’s most personal release to date. The album finds him stepping away from ensemble arrangements to focus on quiet and meditative compositions that value space, restraint, and emotional presence. Some pieces were originally written for Bing & Ruth, but Moore ultimately felt they belonged elsewhere. “I want to keep growing,” he says, “and challenge dogmatic ways of thinking.” That desire made him rethink both his playing and his creative process, leading him toward a more intuitive and almost trance-like approach to playing, where structure and instinct meet.
The album’s title reflects a philosophy Moore has come to embrace over time. Questioning the idea of constant progress or arrival, he instead leans into being present. “There is no mountaintop – and no path to it,” he writes. “Only a hope that we may, if we’re lucky, occasionally graze the bell.”
The album’s intimacy is also mirrored in the cover, depicting his wife flying a kite on the North Carolina coast, which Moore cross-stitched over ten months while Graze The Bell was being mixed.
Ahead of the album’s release, Moore has shared the utterly stunning and stirring ‘Offering’, alongside a video directed by Nick Vranizan. The track captures the album’s spirit, unfolding slowly and patiently. “‘Offering’ is an extension of my never-ending quest to move through harmony like water using an instrument that is very much like stone,” Moore explains. “Spiritually, the song and title grew from a period of my life that saw intense challenge and wild transformation, both of which required a relinquishing of control – a time when the only way through was up”. Speaking about the video, he comments:
“The film, sparked from a thought we had to expand on the cross-stitched album art. We decided early on to shun any form of generative AI and focus on technique and impulse. It’s rare I see a visual for a song that so closely matches the feeling of playing it; what Nick’s created here is not just something beautiful in its own right, but also a passage to understanding the music on a deeper level.”
Vranizan also had this to say about it:
“I have to say that I think the music is responsible for bringing real magic to the film. It made images that could easily have looked like a screensaver feel mercurial and familiar, like navigating a memory.”
Watch the video for ‘Offering’ now.
