Maybe 19 Years Was Exactly What Brendan Ranney Needed for “Slightly Out of Focus”

There’s something so fitting about calling an album Slightly Out of Focus when the whole thing feels like it was pulled from the blur between memory and the present. And to think that it took 19 years for Brendan Ranney to release it to the world just makes the album feel more earned and personal.

Hailing from Claremont, California, Brendan Ranney is an indie singer-songwriter who knows his way around a guitar and isn’t afraid to let his work get a little messy. You can hear remnants of The Police, Social Distortion, R.E.M., and Midnight Oil in his songs, all hemmed into vulnerability and reflection that feels distinctly his own.

For an opening track, My Existence (No Not Today) does exactly what it needs to do— set the tone, the mood, and leave the door wide open for each song that will come next. The lyrics read like loose threads of ordinary days, far from tidy, yet familiar in its uncertainty. Then there’s a little phrase at the center of it all: “No not today.” And whether it’s optimism, a push, or simply buying yourself another 24 hours, it still carries a strange kind of comfort.

The vibe jumped from distortion to something unexpectedly tender. Last Ride indeed sounds like its name: a little fleeting, a little restless, the kind of track you don’t need to decipher word by word to understand what it means. By the third track, it becomes clearer that Ranney has no intention of making this a still, predictable record. Second Son wears 1980s dark rock influence proudly, like it has learned exactly how good a little gloom and eeriness can sound when embedded in the guitars.

I Remember You feels exactly like a memory that happened after a few drinks that’s darker and blurrier. Then he drops, “Do you remember me?” as if the question is pulled straight from the bottom of a glass. There’s tenderness from the layers of Here With You, yet something about it feels uneasy. The repeated “I’m not the same” gives that softness a bruise and a restless edge underneath. The record ends with Sail Away, and it feels like it has finally let the air out of everything that came before. For an ender, this track doesn’t give you answers; it just leaves the door open and lets you decide where to go next.

Ranney’s guitar work definitely give so much character to the album. And it’s not the flashy, show-off kind but the one that speaks with so much passion, feelings, and musicality. One moment they’re impatient, and then the next one feels almost delicate, naturally shifting from one to another. It’s as if he’s playing his whole history that’s tangled up in the strings.

And then there’s his songwriting that is just as compelling. Some lines feels like fragments from a bigger story, while some are vivid enough to paint a whole picture in your head. There’s something deeply introspective from the way he writes yet it doesn’t feel self-absorbed, like he’s leaving the door open for you to sit with your own thoughts alongside his.

For a musician coming back after 19 years, the hardest part probably isn’t picking up the guitar again. It’s figuring out what you have to say now. For Ranney, that spark of creativity started to flicker again after stumbling upon his late father’s poetry. And thank God he did because what came after is a record of someone rediscovering not just music, but also a part of himself.

He could’ve made an album obsessed with proving he still had it, but instead, he gives a 10-track album that doesn’t try to arrive somewhere. It wanders, remembers, hesitates, and lets itself stay a little blurry, all in Slightly Out of Focus.